CMS Advisory: ECM systems are not SOA-compatible

CMS Watch, an Olney, Md.-based analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, finds enterprise content management (ECM) products ill-equipped to meet the security requirements of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

“Separating out the SOA hype from the ECM reality remains difficult, as vendors have aggressively positioned their products as SOA-ready—while most are not,” says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, lead analyst for the CMSWatch report on SOA. “When vendors talk about SOA, they mostly mean that they have SOAP-enabled their APIs, but that's not really the point.”

CMSWatch says an SOA-ready ECM solution should have these characteristics:

• Awareness of the location of content items, whether originals, duplicates, or previous versions;
• Interactivity with Identity Management protocols and products;
• Real-time, bidirectional integration with directory servers;
• Ability to remotely control access to content items;
• Ability to track change history on content items occurring remotely; and
• Synchronizing off-line devices to monitor and manage data copied there.