June 2001

CONTENT & COLLABORATION

Bridge the Gap to Legacy Content

by Lowell Rapaport

Enterprises rarely grow smoothly. Development proceeds at different rates, and infrastructure is often assembled from a hodgepodge of systems, some added through mergers and acquisitions, some installed by different departments with varying needs. The result often is an assortment of incompatible content stores that are difficult to access and integrate in a standardized, Web-based environment.

Tying this content together is a problem with few solutions other than costly custom integration. But an alternative can be found in Venice Bridge, a standards-based integration architecture offered by Venetica, Charlotte, NC.

Venice Bridge serves two purposes, according to Andy Warzecha, an analyst with META Group (www.metagroup.com), Stamford, CT. "It permits the seamless exchange of information between dissimilar content management systems," Warzecha says, "and it gives you a single application programming interface to write to when developing software for moving data to things like portals and application servers."

Venice Bridge essentially virtualizes repositories, making them appear as a single source of content from the point of view of the user or application. Venice Bridge can also be described as a metadata formatting tool, giving software developers and integrators a unified architecture that simplifies the job of integrating multiple repositories to standardized J2EE (Java 2 platform, Enterprise Edition)/Web-based environments.

Venetica offers off-the-shelf integrations with content management repositories as diverse as Documentum, Lotus Domino and Notes, Eastman Software, FileNet, Opentext, Oracle IFS, IBM Content Manager and PC Docs, and disk file systems such as NTFS (Windows NT file system) and UFS (Unix file system).

The architecture is designed to save time and money on integration and improve interoperability. Genentech, a San Francisco-based pharmaceutical firm that develops drugs through genetic engineering, had nearly a dozen incompatible content repositories, including an Oracle backend and a FileNet repository. The FileNet system was not compatible with the Macintosh computers favored by Genentech's scientists, and the company also faced the challenge of retaining a repository for documents filed with government agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration.

"We wanted to give companywide access to all our repositories," says Stu Nixon, Genentech's senior product manager. "At first we tried an Optix portal from Mindwrap, but to connect each of the dozen content repositories to the portal, we had to write a special extension for each repository." Nixon says the project was ultimately abandoned because the process of writing extensions would have taken six months for each repository.

The company then selected Venetica's Jasper browser-based thin client for viewing content. Instead of modifying each repository, the company turned to Venice Bridge. "With Venice Bridge, it took just a week to integrate the first repository with the Jasper viewer. By this summer, we will be able to give all our workers and scientists access to all the content in all our repositories."

According to Venetica, Venice Bridge does more than just open access to content - it can also integrate functionality. This means that if you use document/content management systems with special functions like document check-in and check-out, Venice Bridge will extend that same functionality to the software used to access the repository, be it a portal, a simple Web viewer or a Web content management system.

Venice Bridge also supports federated searching, allowing a single search term or phrase to be used across multiple content repositories. This might turn up connections between structured and unstructured data. In a supply chain environment, for example, product descriptions kept in one repository can be related to the catalog number of the same product kept in a database. In a legal environment, the documents relating to a case can be kept in a repository of unstructured data while billing information relating to the same case can be kept in a repository of structured data.

Venice Bridge's Access Services functions support the integration of content and functionality, but the architecture also offers Exchange Services and View Services. The Exchange Services provide tools that enable XML-based interaction with other enterprises, net markets or Web exchanges. The View Services can convert native file output from content repositories into browser-compatible formats.

Software developers can use Venice Bridge to simplify their programming requirements. For example, portal vendor Viador, of Mountain View, CA, (www.viador.com), has developed a Content Repository Portlet using Venetica's Venice Bridge technology.

"We get a lot of requests to integrate a variety of content and document repositories into our portal," says Kevin Smith, Viador's director of portlet marketing. "We could write individual portlets for each repository, but Venetica has a set of application programming interfaces that lets us write a single portlet that could then reach multiple repositories."

Warzecha, of META Group, says there are no true competitors to Venice Bridge. "Some products such as Enigma and Enterworks have similar functionality, but none have the breadth of compatibility with content management systems that Venice Bridge has," he says.

Companies that have standardized on a single content repository may not realize as big a benefit from Venice Bridge in terms of integration cost savings, but if speed to deployment is an issue, it still offers an edge. There's no doubt that more and more content management system providers will offer their own out-of-the-box integrations to a J2EE/Web-based world, but for now, Venice Bridge has the right product at the right time.