Vignette Corp. has bolstered its V6 CM (content management) system with support for Web services standards in a move aimed at slashing the cost and complexity of content sharing.
The company announced recently it will arm V6 with support for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language), which allow CM processes to be exposed as Web services.
The news comes as other CM vendors, including Interwoven Inc. and Divine Inc., position their offerings to take advantage of Web services. Available this quarter, Interwoven’s PortalReady SDK is a SOAP-and XML-based interface for integrating CM into portals and exposing CM functions as Web services.
For its part, Chicago-based Divine plans to tap its J2EE-based Content Server to offer business solutions that are based on the Web services model and target the manufacturing and competitive intelligence arenas.
Vignette’s V6 offers native support for both J2EE and .Net environments, as well as existing support for XML. The new Web-services CM process exposes content objects through an XML-based API, wraps the objects in a SOAP envelope, and deploys the envelope to an active directory that is used by other companies to find the Web service they want, according to Santi Pierini, vice president of product strategy at Vignette in Austin, Texas.
One of the biggest benefits of exposing CM as a Web service is the capability of further automating the CM process, according to Pierini.
“It is an added assurance if customers [adopt] Web services, the tools they depend on [for] dealing with code or content will have a continuity to it,” said Rikki Kirzner, research director at IDC in Mountain View, Calif.