Introduction on integrating translation applications, Web Content Management, Portal and Search to achieve a common business goal.

[Vision]How to maximize the return of investment and achieve a business goal which gives a strategic advantage in a dynamic market where having a localized website is key to either become a leader or “an also ran.”

Let us say the English content is available(it can be any locale, taking this example since, most of the US enterprises have default language as English - let us call the original content) and use it for translation and develop full independent localized websites which can be specifically tailored for lets say unique marketing campaigns, SMB market, Sales promotions and bringing a unified dashboard view of the company products allowing the management to make decisions, research and allows the probable customer to speak to somebody in the local language and in the local market (Very important).

[Obstacles]Some may say why not use a single enterprise wide application which will do this task, but in reality of the today’s world where companies have been forced to become frugal and interdepartmental budgets have been slashed, it is a situation of either do or die.

All companies irrespective of scale have applications/platforms/architectures which can fix a small part of the puzzle but cannot provide an entire solution on their own. What we will discuss in the article today is a business scenario on how we can leverage common technologies and use the intelligence within different business units in an enterprise to work together to achieve a win-win situation.

These different applications are departmentalized, on different platforms, different content repositories and are individual silos, Consider them as individual Blocks:

1. A legacy application owned by IT department “BU1”, which is well integrated with translation engines, had experience in content publishing, users are very well accustomed in using it and is also the storehouse of content in the original language (in US enterprises the default language is English locale=en_US) .

This application is a self contained application and has the relevant knowledge to build the Translation information with the original content and building multi locale web sites.

2. Web Content Management (WCM) Platform and Publishing modules supporting most of the industry standards. All WCM applications have their custom GUI, templates, workflows, taxonomy representations etc. On-boarding the knowledge workers to begin using these applications has its own challenges including learning curve, training costs among others all of which delay rollout of new services.

3. Enterprise Search based on a popular search platform, which is responsible for providing a search service to the customers. We need not elaborate the importance of search. If customers are unable to find what they are looking for they will not be ready to build on a partnership with the company.

4. Portal framework – Responsible for dynamically rendering the pages governed with business rules and permissions. Business rules can include (listing only a very few) Customized Experience Management - That could depend on location or

what they are looking for, interests, personalization etc Different marketing campaign for different products or based on user profile. Ability to cross sell or up-sell on what a logged in user currently owns.

A Use case can be:- User logs into the legacy application, selects the original document for ex.( locale en_US) send it for translation (can be a machine translation engine for ex. AppTek, SYSTRAN, Google translate among others)- These documents are stored in a repository (for ex. Documentum, Alfresco, Day among many others)- Publish these documents to a WCM solution.- WCM platform publishes the document on a file-system; assign relevant metadata, categories and taxonomies.- Portal accesses the file-system for the content and based on metadata+ business rules, renders the document and provides customized user experience based on the user profile – We can call it like “Custom Experience Management”- User searches for the content on the website.

Integrate these individual applications and platforms.

There are multiple ways to integrate independent repositories, applications on different platforms:

Develop a mechanism to integrate legacy applications with WCM platform. Possible options are using CMIS, REST, SOAP services. Each has its own advantages, but the important thing to ensure are :

o Ability to transfer data/content via the serviceo Ensure Interoperability as much as possible.o Ease of implementation and skill set requirements.

JCR compliant repositories (JSR – 170, JSR – 283) - Enterprises who are getting ready to implement an ECM strategy should seriously think of products which are JCR compliant. There are several vendors like day software, Alfresco which provide Java APIs. JCR Wikipedia link.

A mechanism for user authentication and authorization when communicating via web services. Will try to provide additional details with a use case in another article to follow.

Integrating via a services gateway mediator which can be a body or a software put in place to ensure maintainability, transparency and serviceability for the various Web services employed within an enterprise. A quick Google search pointed to the following resource.

Maintaining the different translation information within WCM

Integrating Portal platform with the Web Content Management System

All products in the Web Content management space allow rendering platforms to gain access to the metadata and the content however they may be stored. Usually publishing modules publish the content to the file system or the web server and stores the predefined metadata in a Database, there could be some variations but that is the general accepted philosophy.

Things to consider: Web Services technology as described above. Authentication and Authorization mechanism as an SSO token to mange the user

identity across the enterprise. Defining the CMS services. It depends on the requirement if there is a necessity

to write a custom wrapper on top of the default services or use the services as such. For example Documentum provides DFS (Documentum Foundation Services) – the services framework for its classes, we can write a custom wrapper on top of DFS which provides the flexibility to get into molecular and fine grained details in providing the requirement.

Managing the translated content and the relationships with the original content. For example we have content with locale en_US and translation to fr_FR and zh_CN. The WCM system can be told to build a corresponding relationship within the pages and the platform responsible for publishing the documents can write business rules accordingly. There should be the relationship between the original content and the translated documents along with the type of relationship. A sample representation can be:

Parent Child Relation Type Locale

< Reference to the version specific id of the Original document >

< version specific id of the Translated document >

Machine Translation / Human Translation

Fr_FR

< Reference to the version specific id of the Original document >

< version specific id of the Translated document >

Machine Translation / Human Translation

Zh_CN

Enterprise Search as a ServiceEnterprise Search is usually a black box environment which excels in search capabilities. But using search as a silo application is no longer the only requirement; it is now expected to do much more, for example,

integrating with Content management platforms Real time indexing of content – Usually the search crawler finishes indexing the

content in couple of hrs or may be SLA of 24 hrs (depending on the size, scale and complexity) but what if there is a need for emergency indexing for strategic, business reasons.

Personalized Search - For example, when a user logs into the Portal, based on the preferences and interests, the search results are customized accordingly.

o For example if “User XYZ” belongs to community “Java Developer” and has interests in “Photography”, “Interface Design” – The different portlets will provide the latest news/articles created by other users in the same community, Top rated articles, tips and tricks among so many other things with the same interest.

Content Discovery module – Responsible for discovery of content and metadata and providing the same to other applications. This may be necessary in scenarios where a system needs to see all the published content as a whole and should be able to relate to it as well, allowing business users to effectively manage the collateral for maximum ROI.

o Generating RSS feeds or podcasts – Search has the index of all the content published in the Enterprise and probably could be used for

content discovery and provide differential information to other applications.

A consolidate view of the different integrated applications

Conclusion

The following illustrates the different application tied together to achieve a common business goal, a good example of cross functional and collaborative effort.The translated content is imported from a different application into the ECM platform, where the relationships are maintained and different chunks associated to each other which are published and then rendered via a Portal and search capabilities served by a Search engine.

About the Authors

Makam,Dhirajhttp://makam-dhiraj.blogspot.com/