I already have a content management system. What value can I derive from the content management system included with the portal?
QUESTION POSED ON: 02 AUG 2005
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Tony Higham
Some content management vendors provide portlets that allow you to manage and display content in the WebSphere Portal. While managing content through a portal interface makes sense (single sign-on to the content management system just like any other application in the portal), having a run-time dependency on the content management system for the display of content needs to be carefully evaluated. If your content management system is not clustered then a run-time dependency creates a single point of failure in your architecture. If the content management system needs to be recycled or taken out of service for maintenance, then your portal environment is immediately affected. Also content management systems are typically sized based on the activities of content contributors and not necessarily content viewers. Thus a run-time dependency can result in an overall reduced performance of the portal and the content management system.
One alternative is to publish content to a traditional Web server so that it can be brought into the portal using the Web Clipper portlet or perhaps a customer portlet that uses the ContentAccess service to access the content. Another alternative is to publish content to the repository of the Workplace Web Content Management (WCM) product, which is included in the portal software (it's always installed and running under the covers, you just have to enable the interface). The benefit of publishing content to the WCM repository is that you can leverage the content delivery, caching and personalization capabilities that are built into WCM. I've seen this be a great win-win strategy because it supports the user of the corporate content management system, but does not preclude you from using the valuable content delivery features that WCM brings to the portal environment.
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