An extensible enterprise content management system with service component architecture

Abstract

Automation of document tracking and lifecycle management using content management systems is getting more and more momentum as large enterprises attempt to streamline business processes and improve productivity. Traditionally, 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 novel service-oriented approach is introduced for the implementation of a distributed enterprise content management system that is composed from a number of basic service components. These service components are designed based on 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. To ensure availability of application services, a runtime dependency model and a bootstrapping mechanism based on graph traversal algorithm are introduced. In this paper, the overall system architecture, the design of each service, the approach to assemble the services into higher-level composite services, and the component runtime dependency model are explained in details. A practical implementation shows that our design is able to support extensible on-demand management services and is capable to scale up for large enterprises without costly development efforts. ©2008 IEEE.