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Options for Integrating External Content with Portal

WebSphere Portal can easily display content from its own robust web content management system (WCM).  But surveys have found that more than 50% of companies have more than one content management system they want to integrate with Portal.  There are several out-of-the-box solutions that you can use to pull content from other systems and display in your portal.

Here are a few of the options available to you with little effort:

  • Syndicated Feed Portlet – if you can get the other content management system to produce RSS or Atom feeds, you can display that content through this portlet.  This portlet produces a list similar to what other feed readers would produce.  You can apply some basic formatting to the feed.
  • Web Content Integrator – this application ships with Portal and actually copies data from an external system into WCM as real content items.  Your other system has to be capable of producing RSS or Atom feeds.  Once set up, content coming from the external system is read and stored in WCM.  Once in WCM, you have full control over the content including personalization, formatting, workflow, etc.  You display the content using any of the WCM rendering portlets.
  • Link to Remote Content – WCM includes the ability to create links to remote content including Enterprise Content Management systems such as FileNet and DB2 Content Manager.  When you create the link a wizard guides you through specifying the server, a user id and password.  Once you are authenticated, you can pick from a list of documents available to you.

Of course, you (or Perficient!) can always custom build integration between portal and your other content management systems.

Thoughts on “Options for Integrating External Content with Portal”

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention Options for Integrating External Content with Portal | Portal Solutions Blog -- Topsy.com

  2. Hi,
    Nice article, but we are looking solution the otherway, to access the WCM contents to be displayed in a separate mobile site. can you please highlight what integration mechanics are available to access WCM/Websphere Portal contents.

  3. Mark Polly Post author

    There are several options for retrieving content from WCM for use elsewhere. A common technique is to create RSS or Atom feeds from WCM and consume those feeds from your other system.

    Option 2nd to use the built-in REST services of Portal.

    A third option is to use the WCM APIs to directly interact with the content repository. These APIs are well documented on the Portal info center.

    Another option is to syndicated your content to a static web site instead of portal and the content then becomes plain HTML files that you can use.

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Mark Polly

Mark Polly is Perficient's Chief Strategist for Customer Experience Platforms. He works to create great customer, partner, and employee experiences. Mark specializes in web content management, portal, search, CRM, marketing automation, customer service, collaboration, social networks, and more.

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