Open Market Champions a Standards-Based Approach

by Marvin Pyles

Some consider space.com (www.space.com) the definitive Internet site for space-related information, featuring news, education and entertainment. The writers and editors of Space.com produce daily updates as well as feature articles incorporating graphics and streaming video. The main Space.com site has five sister sites (soon to be expanded to 10) and a print magazine that also needs content production and retention.

All of this is handled by one content management application: Content Server Enterprise Edition, from Open Market, Burlington, MA. Space.com had decided to upgrade its existing content management application, which was developed using an earlier version of Open Market, late last year. It wanted a more robust, common framework that would allow content and code developers to support the site's existing publishing and e-commerce applications. After evaluating leading content management products, including Vignette and Interwoven, Space.com chose to upgrade to Open Market's 3.5 version of Content Server Enterprise Edition (CSEE).

"Open Market gave us the best bang for the buck," says Mark Cutworths, Space.com's chief technology officer. "[It offers] good production reliability, scalability, ease of implementation and dependability. Also, it allows us to make any customizations needed."

CSEE 3.5 is an enterprise application that includes products for content management, personalization, catalog management and dynamic content delivery. At the heart of the architecture is Content Server - the development, operation and delivery platform. Relying on Java, XML and Java server pages, the Content Server module provides the system's core functionality, including a customizable workflow, role-based authentication, revision tracking, load balancing, clustering and failover capabilities.

Content Server supports BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, iPlanet or any J2EE-compliant application server.

"Open Market has a very open architecture," says Dan Liliedahl, founder and chief technology officer of Efoundry (www.efoundrycorp.com), an Internet systems integrator that specializes in extending the Open Market application. "Open Market was [among] the first content management vendor to embrace J2EE. Unlike others, Open Market doesn't have J2EE connectors. It actually resides on the J2EE server. This makes it very easy to integrate with other systems."

Content Server also provides an XML interface for integrating third-party search engines such as Verity or Alta Vista. Unlike content management applications that only allow searching on the published site, CSEE allows content creators to search the repository for assets in different stages of creation.

CSEE 3.5 improves on previous versions with more XML integration, including an XSL style sheet transformer and parser. Also new to 3.5 is Marketing Studio, an application that collects data about site visitors and allows business managers (using a graphical user interface) to create personalized, Web-based marketing campaigns and promotions.

On top of Content Server is Content Centre, an intuitive, browser-based interface that gives nontechnical users, such as editors, authors and business managers, access to all of Content Server's content management functionality. Users can create, manage, manipulate and deliver content to multiple media, including Web sites, email, offline materials or wireless devices. If necessary, the interface can be customized.

Templates control the look and feel of Web pages. Templates are classified as either static or dynamic. Dynamic templates, referred to by Open Market as "smart" templates, are created using Content Server's XML tags. When a visitor requests a page, embedded logic within the template grabs specified assets from the content repository and dynamically generates the page. Templates contain both HTML and XML constructs, including conditionals, loops and error handling.

Templates streamline site functionality such as role-based content viewing, date-based publishing and access to session variables. They also ensure a consistent look and feel across the site. Templates can also call other templates stored within the server directory structure.

Cutworths praises the templating approach for keeping down management overhead. He says he is "anxiously awaiting even more pre-canned templates for articles and multimedia-enhanced pages."

The CSEE suite can be extended with available tools such as Catalog Centre, Personalization Centre, Integration Centre (for integration to legacy systems), Battlestar Server (for system monitoring) and Satellite Server (for content syndication).

Marvin Pyles (mpyles@cms-analysis.com) is a content management consultant in Atlanta. He has worked for integrators including Sapient, IMI Systems and Keane.