CM-Side Integrations Mocked Up

In the last post I mentioned you can have Tridion provide authors ways to access external (non-Web Content Management or WCM) systems without having the data completely stored in Tridion. Though we've called these "third-party" integrations in training, from a customer perspective these can get confusing among an ecosystem of tools, solutions, and vendors. Let's just stick with WCM integrations for scenarios where you have Tridion plus some-other-system-external-to-Tridion.

I've found a few WCM-side mock ups (or even prototypes and examples) along with  authoring requirements can help teams navigate the challenges between business wants and system needs. In your WCM business requirements consider including stories or requirements such as, "as an author, I want to be able to manage ________ [some possibly external functionality] from the context of ________ [a Tridion item] to be able to ________ [accomplish some important business objective]."

Tip: if you're on an SDL Tridion 2013 implementation, then ECL (check out the video!) should be a strong candidate if you're looking to integrate multimedia (binary) files from another system.

Easy (but with some technical debt)

The simplest integration could be component text fields that have the unique identifiers in some other system. This would be all manual and isn't necessarily the friendliest approach. Here are a few mock-ups of the extension points that others have talked about here (the list), here (get started), here (best practices), here (early example), here (examples and more examples), here (look, script but no GUI), here (dare to extend rich text format areas?), here (ooh, search), here (pop-ups!), and especially here (great starting point for all extensions).

Where to Extend the Interface

In Experience manager, you can do the typical GUI extensions (1 and 3) but also optionally add Staging-specific markup (see programmatic ways to know your template or publishing context).

Add new tabs and buttons to the toolbar or even staging-specific markup for Experience Manager extensions.

The "S's" of CM-Side Integration

Your data doesn't need to be in Tridion to let authors manage or use this data in one of Tridion's interfaces or editors such as the Content Manager Explorer (CME) or Experience Manager (XPM).

As you consider Tridion integrations, be sure to address scalability, synchronization, search (& select), and save.

Scalability and Peformance

You want to be sure you're not having your Web Content Management system (WCMS) manage information that's best handled by the available solutions. For example, product information might be better served by a Product Information Management (PIM) system, whereas Web copy about these products may be a better fit for the WCMS.

You might have legacy applications that are unique to your industry and business which aren't necessarily bad. Although they may have a decade or so of history, legacy systems may also have a good amount of bug fixes (read Joel or the wiki discussion on c2.com).

Bring you expertise and understanding of your preferred solutions to this discussion but to be open to alternatives as well as realistic and practical on how systems will work together. This applies to content strategists, analysts, business stakeholders, developers, and architects regardless if they're part of the customer, partner, or vendor.

On a practical note, Tridion's Content Manager Explorer (CME) can reasonably handle hundreds to a few thousand items per folder or category. GUI performance slows down at about the same point where it gets difficult (for humans) to manage that many items in a given folder.