Service-Oriented Approach for Implementing an Extensible Content Management System

Enterprise content management systems deal with the management of business documents and related human workflow between organizations. Many of these systems are built as monolithic, stand-alone applications that lack the dynamicity support and are difficult to scale and interoperate with other enterprise systems. In order to tackle these issues, a service-oriented approach is introduced for the implementation of a distributed enterprise content management system that is composed from a number of common service components. The basic common service components are implemented according to the service component architecture (SCA), and consist of a content repository service, a document workflow service, a document search service, a notification service, a security service, an execution log service, and an integration service. In content repository service, a document meta-model is defined for managing, tracking and storage of business documents. In this paper, we first present the overall system architecture and detailed design of each service. We then illustrate how to assemble these services into higher-level composite services in order to provide document management functions for the enterprise application. Our implementation shows that our design is able to support on-demand document management services and scale-up in a large enterprise, without much development efforts.