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The architectural frameworks for content in WCM consist of portal, traditional, internal facing, and external facing.
This section describes the various architectural frameworks for content in WCM.
Portal
Portal provides the basic framework services for content aggregation, role-based access, personalization, and security.
The underlying J2EE platform provides low-level middleware services such as enabling security through a user registry and session management. These underlying services coupled with the basic portal framework services can provide content life cycle management in terms of content authoring and content delivery. Different roles, such as author, reviewer, and approver, can move content from authoring to delivery.
The content management and delivery framework embedded in portal can be used in tandem with other features, such as personalization and content aggregation, which provides an effective presentation layer in the architecture. The portal framework allows the delivery of pages and sites that combine content from the CMS and other kinds of portal content from back-end systems.
Traditional
In the traditional architectural framework, content is prepared in pure HTML format by using different HTML editors, and the content is hosted on a web server for presentation.
The URLs are exchanged with the reviewers and approvers for verification and validation over e-mail. The hosting platform does not provide content management. The dynamic applications came into existence with CGI scripts but had many limitations. The evolution of the J2EE platform brought new ways to display content on web sites: Static web content can be coupled with the dynamic content that is generated through servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs). However, the traditional framework still lacks in content management functionality.
Internal facing
Internal facing sites are sites designed for and used by the employees of an organization.
Internal sites typically provide access to content and applications that employee access on a frequent basis. Often, key applications or content are delivered that attract employees to visit the sites. Such entities include news, alerts, and role-specific content. Intranet users can benefit greatly if the sites provide applications that are useful for day-to-day activities, such as sales management, defect tracking, customer relationship management, or technical support.
The integration of Web Content Manager and Portal allows content to be interspersed amongst other portal artifacts (pages, portlets, gadgets and widgets)
External facing
External facing sites are sites designed for and used for by general public or partners of an organization.
On external facing sites, the content should be clear, relevant and up-to-date and be easily and quickly accessed by users. Users' opinion of a website may directly influence the image of the associated organizations in the public eye.
The site should be engaging and easy to use. Users want a site where the content they are looking for is easily found through navigation or search. The site should be fast and responsive, making use of caching techniques at various levels to enhance the response times for a variety of scenarios. A user may want to register with the site using a unique ID, content can then be personalized according to the profile of each user. The design of such a framework should consider how the content is managed, searched, cached, and personalized for users, with the goal of attracting and keeping the attention of the users.