An SOA framework for ECM

ECM services can provide an important component to any SOA framework.

The past few years has seen an enormous amount of enthusiasm generated around SOA — Service Oriented Architectures.  Clearly while the hype has been high, there really is a lot of sustance behind the SOA initiative.  Both its benefits and ROI are attractive.

The concept behind SOA is to create complex enterprise-wide systems based on small modular components.  The approach is a best-practice architectural pattern that provides great flexibility in selecting and integrating with best-of-breed components.  It allows for wide-ranging interoperability of software developed for different platforms using different tools.  It promotes the diffusion of information across the enterprise, providing any application with a need to incorporate the information managed by a service an easy way to tap into it.

While today there still aren’t that many companies that have jumped full throttle into the world of SOA, that’s probably to be expected.  Most companies are taking a slow, measured approach, with a lot of up-front experimentation and prototyping.  But this slow adoption rate is beginning to change. 

Gartner’s Charles Abrams first coined the SOA acronym in 1996.  Now Gartner predicts that SOA will become the next dominant framework for creating and delivering enterprise software.  They forecast that by 2008 more than 80% of enterprise IT development project will be employing some form of SOA.  And they see the rise of SOBAs — Service Oriented Business Applications.

Abrams commented in 2004 at an Gartner summit that “They [SOAs] will enable real-time uses of structured information to enable enterprises to be competitive.”   But SOAs don’t need to be limited to structured information.

ECM (Enterprise Content Management) Services/SOBAs built around content and unstructured data fit well into the SOA framework.

Enterprise Repository – SOA ECM services allow a common unstructured repository to be accessed by and supplement a range of IT initiatives, like CRM, ERP, or SCM.

Accessibility – SOA ECM services integrated into familiar front-end UIs eliminate the need to have users log into an isolated and dedicated ECM system.

Automation – By its very nature SOA ECM services provide a programmable interface that allows easy integration into business applications, portals and workflow processes.

Formtek has extended its Orion product by creating SOA Web Service components.  With a Web Service interface, unstructured data can be accessed immediately in real time from any language or platform.  From an integrator’s perspective, what’s fantastic about the SOA Web Services framework is that any application, whether it is written for Java, .Net  or SAP’s NetWeaver, is able to interface and communicate with a common ECM service interface.

Formtek | Orion 5 Web Services implements standard W3C Web Services interfaces including WSDL, SOAP, HTTP, and XML.  Orion Web Services exposes secure Library Service functionality, such as search, retrieval, check-in/check-out, and version management.  It can serve as a fundamental storage service component accessed by many IT enterprise applications for managing content and documents.