Integrating UCM into larger architectures

Imagine that you need to store a vendor invoice in Content Server. The transaction itself is entered in your Vendor Management ERP system and you're trying to avoid making your procurement staff enter data in two places. And, of course, you'll need to be able to get that invoice document out of Content Server from within the ERP, should they decide to view or print it. What are your choices?

The first one I'd consider is SOAP Web Service, which we will discuss in the next section.

SOAP web services

As we've seen in Chapter 8, Backup, Restore, and Content Migration, the Content Server itself is a completely Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) system, where each action the server takes is a discreet service call. And each of these calls can be done remotely, assuming you have the correct permissions and authorization, or chained together. This makes it extremely powerful and easy to integrate.

Let's review a couple of definitions before we proceed:

Simple...