New business requirements are leading companies to change the way they deploy enterprise content management (ECM) data and applications. Faced with the limited interoperability and/or scalability of conventional ECM platforms, developers are turning to Web services as a way to realize ECM functionality and real-time content wherever they are needed within an organization. While this approach is still relatively new and more work remains to be done to improve the effectiveness, it already shows promise as a better way to think about ECM technology.

In the past each group within an organization typically worked with its own content and applications, each with its own server, capabilities, workflows, and user interface: financial personnel with accounting data and systems; knowledge workers with documents in document management (DM) systems; customer service staff with CRM platforms, and so forth. As long as business processes remained confined within these departments, the lack of interoperability among these systems was of secondary concern.

However lately, in order to improve productivity and agility in responding to changing business requirements, organizations are pursuing new initiatives and objectives that increasingly involve multiple departments, data stores, and business processes, as well as moving more content and applications out to internal and customer-facing Web sites. As developers seek to integrate ECM into a broad range of packaged and custom applications and portals, the need for a more flexible approach to integrating ECM technologies across the enterprise becomes increasingly evident. Separate silos for different types of content make composite business applications difficult to develop and deploy, and require custom code to bridge different APIs, interfaces, and platforms. Further, foundation capabilities such as security, access control, workflow, and renditions may be available only in selected content type-specific offerings.

Web services offer a way to escape these content silos, thereby enabling developers to put specific ECM functionality where it's needed more quickly and in a more cost-effective manner, for example by:

• Displaying the content and metadata stored in an ECM repository within a business interface such as a portal
• Embedding a process for content creation, review, and deployment within a business interface
• Adding an in-house process management toolset to a digital asset management interface
• Aggregating search services for disparate repositories to provide user-friendly content-access capability

By using Web services in this way, companies can streamline internal processes and cut time and costs on the back end so that they can devote more resources to servicing customers.

So far, the actual deployment of Web services-based ECM has been tentative. Gartner reports that North American companies are implementing Web services slowly, as they are still in the "experimentation stages." Gartner also reports that, of those respondents being assisted by a consultant or systems integrator in the implementation of Web services, 68 percent are implementing fewer than 10 services, largely for intracompany purposes.

However, this slow adoption rate shows signs of increasing in the near future. According to the same Gartner survey, over 50 percent of the surveyed companies reported that they planned to use Web services for IT initiatives such as CRM, ERP, or SCM. In tandem with this growing interest, the ECM Association AIIM (www.aiim.org) has recently unveiled a new project to develop a Web services framework for Interoperable Enterprise Content Management (iECM). The stated goal of this project is to help organizations integrate content into business processes through a common set of standards for accessing enterprise content.

As more developers and companies prepare to take the plunge, they will discover both the significant potential benefits of this approach as well as the work that remains to be done to fully realize these benefits.

Early Potential - and Remaining Challenges
The Web services stack consists of several specifications, including SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI - all of which are based on XML. The recent BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) specification allows process engines to orchestrate Web service invocations. By leveraging these open technologies, providers of Web services can significantly improve upon existing API functionality for system and business process integration. For example, consider the following benefits:

• Parceling out API functionality based on user skill level, helping adoption, and improving the usage of the base application
• Insulating users from minor API changes, reducing the overhead of having to rebuild and deploy client applications
• Providing a layer of business logic to help minimize confusion and/or misuse of the base API and application

Web services also allow different APIs to be aggregated to provide a single, common point of use through an unmodified, client-facing interface. For developers who are creating composite applications, the potential benefits of Web services include:

• Quick access to static information (snapshots)
• Ease of use and access without extensive coding and/or knowledge of the application
• A single point of access that simplifies deploying bug fixes
• Dynamic usage of new functionality without the headache of redeploying new client libraries
• Client applications that are no longer bound by the system requirements of client libraries

While the interest level has been high, there are challenges with Web services-based ECM that remain to be overcome. One of these challenges is limited availability. While some ECM vendors have invested to make their functionality available as Web services, many more have yet to do so, and more progress is needed in this respect. On a technological level, more work is needed to improve the performance and capabilities of Web services and the applications they enable. While Web services are already a highly effective way to exchange information that can be considered static, such as a snapshot of the current state of a system, the development of more robust clients will depend on greater interactivity and responsiveness.

While the XML basis of Web services offers many benefits such as cross-platform interoperability and language independence, these benefits do come with a downside, such as the extra burden of processing XML. Attempts to address this limitation include a binary XML standard and Sun Microsystem's Fast Web Services initiative.

Another important issue, which is particularly relevant to ECM systems, is the use of Web services to transfer large files that represent content. Here again there are several approaches, including the use of emerging standards such as WS-Attachment or WS-Transfer, out-of-band techniques with existing protocols such as FTP, custom-built techniques such as HTTP form posts or network file protocols, or even a separate socket.