5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal

Portals and content management systems are widely used in organizations today. For many, the desire to integrate them into a single collaborative environment is critical. But there's a lot to think about before moving forward. In this article we cover the basic considerations for integrating a CMS into an enterprise portal.

A Use Case for Integration

Collaboration is no longer just a buzz word; it is now an enterprise need. Some enterprises have already started seeing the benefits of collaborative work environments. They know that content management plays a very important and crucial role in building a successful collaboration environment by improving processes, increasing employee efficiency and productivity, and lowering costs.

A typical business use case around how content lifecycle plays a role in a collaboration environment would be:

• A user logs in enterprise one stop portal
• They create and manage content (check-in, check-out, update metadata, tag)
• They then share the same content via Wikis, Blogs, Message Boards, Discussion Forums, etc…
• In some cases they may submit content for formal review and approval via some workflow
• They may also comment and/or rate other content
• When they have finished, they log out of the portal

Today almost every Content Management System offers its own user interface that integrates content management and community/collaboration features. WebTop, damTop and CenterStage are examples of collaborative tools for EMC Documentum; Alfresco Share an example for Alfresco.

While these may be feature rich interfaces, an enterprise may not want to add another collaboration tool outside of their portal for managing content. The challenge then becomes how to enable content management capabilities via a one stop enterprise portal.

Integrating a CMS repository with a portal solution provides the following benefits:

• Create, manage and most importantly collaborate on content within and across the community from a single stop enterprise portal enabling collaboration across the organization.
• Effectively utilize social collaboration tools — wikis, blogs, message boards — from the portal framework by attaching content that is already created and managed within the CMS Repository.
• Take advantage of better governance, security and compliance policies (retention etc) for their content. People and communities can collaborate and share content based on standard rules .

1. Define the business specific coarse-grained CMS service to be consumed by portal service
2. Evaluate and decide on the technology option to implement and host the CMS service
3. Evaluate and decide on the technology option for writing portlets for content management
4. Decide the option/strategy on SSO (Single Sign-on)/Authentication from the Portal to the CMS
5. Define the strategy for Community, security/authorization management

1. Define the business specific coarse-grained service to be consumed by portal layer

2. Evaluate & decide on the technology option to implement & host the CMS service

CMIS

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a technical specification for integrating with a ECM (Enterprise Content Management) repository via Web Services. It is a language-independent, repository-independent API for content management. The objective of the CMIS standard is to define a common content management web services interface that can be implemented by a content repository vendor, enabling service interoperability across repositories through standard SOAP and Restful Bindings.

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Tags: cmis, collaboration, content integration, enterprise cms, portal, rest, web cms, web services

Portals and content management systems are widely used in organizations today. For many, the desire to integrate them into a single collaborative environment is critical. But there's a lot to think about before moving forward. In this article we cover the basic considerations for integrating a CMS into an enterprise portal.