Integrating External Content with IBM Web Content Manager V8

Stefan Hepper presented a session at the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference on techniques to integrate external content management systems with IBM WCM.  He first presented on integration of ECM systems into WCM. There are several use cases where this integration is important:

• Author content in external ECM system and deliver it using WCM
• Target documents to the right people at the right time (aka Content Targeting or personalization)
• Let users tag, rate and search/retrieve content in context
• Migrate content from an external system into WCM
• Archive WCM content into an external repository
• Use WCM as the content repository for a third party system

The ECM integration has the following alternatives:

• Federated documents – here the documents remain on the ECM system and WCM provides links to that content
• Web Content Integrator – this tool imports content from the external system directly into WCM
• Custom Workflow Actions – you can use these actions in WCM to export content to ECM systems
• WebDav – import/export content using a WebDav client
• Custom coding using the APIs

New in Portal/WCM V8 is support for CMIS or the Content Management Interoperability Standards.  Other IBM products that support CMIS include Connections, FileNet, IBM Content Manager, and Quickr 8.5 Lists.  Uses cases for CMIS include using WCM to display information about content stored in other systems and creating links from WCM content to external content.

Choosing a Global Software Development Partner to Accelerate Your Digital Strategy

To be successful and outpace the competition, you need a software development partner that excels in exactly the type of digital projects you are now faced with accelerating, and in the most cost effective and optimized way possible.

Get the Guide

CMIS support does not include a producer capability; so you cannot access WCM content through CMIS yet.  IBM is planning to support OASIS Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) for this in the future.

The new CMIS feature in V8 can be used for personalization so you can use data from external CMIS compliant systems in your personalization rules.  WCM will auto-detect feed types using the feed URL and will launch different pickers for CMIS and Document feeds.

Web Content Integrator (WCI) is another feature of WCM that imports content into WCM libraries.  Content in external systems need to be served up using an RSS feed containing meta data about the content.  WCI will then pull in the RSS data feed and create WCM content items for each document in the feed.  WCI can support multiple feeds and can be scheduled to run on a periodic basis.  This feature can be an important tool for migrating from other content management systems or to provide access to content from sources that you wouldn’t let all your users hit individually.

Reader Lee Berry commented that I should have included the WCM REST service in this list, so here it is.  WCM REST is an ATOM-based service that can be used to create, read, update and delete various WCM items.

Finally, WebDav is another tool that can be used to get content into Portal/WCM. Through WebDav, you can manage site areas, upload images and documents, and modify access control and other meta data about your content.  You can’t create content that would normally be built using an authoring template, however.

As shown, WCM provides several mechanisms to move content into WCM and provides multiple ways to serve content from external systems.