Strategies have also been proposed to address the current limitations of Web services in issuing long-running requests. These include the use of asynchronous requests, the implementation of client-side threading, and the utilization of emerging standards such as WS-Eventing to move to a more event-driven model. The latter approach can also be effective in enabling the real-time display of dynamic data.

The Road Ahead
For the moment Web services are most suitable for high-level interactions that do not require either a large degree of bandwidth or a large number of transactions - querying an external system for data, for example. The efforts described above will help enable more robust deployments in the coming year or two, as will improvements to performance through the tuning of underlying systems to the traffic patterns that are characteristic of service-orientation. More important, both performance and stability will improve as organizations gain a deeper understanding of the best ways to employ Web services.

One way to think about the progression of Web services is to recall the early days of Web publishing, when advances in site design and technology outpaced the physical limitations of the network, and the most sophisticated sites were also the most likely to bog down over dial-up connections. Over time though, design principles emerged that were more firmly rooted in practicality, and a focus on optimization led to sites that were both impressive and readily accessible. Similarly, as the development of individual Web services continues, developers will become more adept at techniques for optimizing performance and meeting more demanding requirements.

As this maturation process continues, a new breed of ECM solutions will become possible, offering such benefits as can be illustrated in the context of marketing campaign management. The process: the campaign manager first reviews past campaigns in the CRM system for audience and success criteria. Extracted data and content then become the starting point for the new campaign, supplemented by new text, graphics, and rich media content. This content then goes through a cycle of review, revision, and approval, followed by partner collaboration, testing, and then deployment. Finally, the new campaign is logged into the CRM system for tracking and analysis.

To support this process, a campaign management solution needs to be able to cut across content types - documents, rich media, collaboration, and Web content - that may reside in separate repositories. Moreover, the content must be closely integrated with an external business system, in this case CRM. Such a solution is an ideal candidate for a Web services-based composite application, which could draw on ECM functionality that is exposed as Web services, including core document management services (check-in, check-out, categorization), search, content transformation and metadata extraction, as well as CRM Web services to provide access to accounts, campaigns, contacts, events. and opportunities.

A composite application based on these services would enable the campaign manager to:

• Manage marketing collateral in one place by using integrated ECM functionality
• Schedule and execute targeted marketing campaigns by using integrated CRM functionality
• Use configurable workflows to manage different aspects of the campaign by leveraging the ECM-CRM synergy

As more ECM providers make their functionality available as Web services, and as developers become more adept at maximizing the effectiveness of Web services-based integrations, the benefits of this approach will drive a fundamental shift in the way organizations approach ECM. To be sure, the ongoing hype surrounding Web services has made some wary of exaggerated promises and overlooked pitfalls, but beneath the hype lies real promise, and a better way to support today's rapidly changing business requirements.