The answer is ECM-SOA

Of course the answer (to the previous post's concerns) is to try and leverage a Service Oriented Architecture as part of the ECM strategy. So that starts me on my way.

In order to understand my approach, let me share with you some articles and books that have guided me.

Some articles of interest focusing on ECM-SOA:

• ECM SOA Article in AIIM talks about SOA for ECM in context of Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0 if you will), but still useful
• Integrated Solutions Magazine's ECM SOA article has some data to help support the business case
• Since ECM SOA is discussed in context with Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0) I downloaded a good overview of Enterprise 2.0 to keep up with the buzz
  

But more specifically, my guidance has been more general SOA/Web Services books and guides. is on what SOA is/isn't has been influenced by these books:

• Eric Newcommer's classic Understanding SOA with Web Services is not only informative, but a good read
• Thomas Erl's SOA Principles of Service Design is the classic, but I didn't get as much out of it as I would have liked
• Specifically, I've been interested in Web Services, REST, Enterprise Service Bus and BPM aspects
• RESTFul Web Services from O'reilly is very good
• Enterprise Service Bus by Chapell was our bible for a while in 2004-2006 and may be a bit dated now
• Enterprise Integration Patterns from Martin Fowler's series is exceptional and essential to our work
• I found Essential Business Process Modeling very informative theory oriented. For practical use, i just gleaned from implementation approaches on the web (i.e. JBoss' jBPM)
  

So what is the scope of our work?

The part of ECM we are building now is focused on Web Content Management. We have a common platform on which we can configure, skin and run many travel sites. We are a global company, and our sites must support many languages. The platform must host many brands so each site must be able to be skinned, configured and customized as if it was purpose built.

A key challenge for this is managing web content in multiple languages and for multiple brands. Each type of content we publish to the site needs to be translated to local languages and adapted to fit the brands. Each type of content is currently managed in unique applications, processed with a cadre of custom code and delivered in unique formats.

With all of this custom code, storage and formats, it is difficult to create functions that extend to many types of content, such as those to handle translation and branding. Our challenge is to unify content management and extend our capabilities to efficiently stand up new brands and languages without sinking the content managers and brand managers in a mire of complex, ad-hoc tools, technologies and practices. So our rally cry is "Stand up a new site in 1 day! (any language, any brand)." At least the tools shouldn't be a bottleneck!

Next, our vision...