Confirming the importance of Web services as a tool for enterprise portal integration, premium aggregator Factiva
announced the availability of their content via PeopleSoft's ECM platform using their Factiva Developer's Kit, a Web services-based application programming interface that allows Factiva content to be displayed contextually within a user's web page and to be able to use the "pagelet" interface to initiate searches for additional content. While not the first premium content provider to offer their wares via a major ECM portal provider using Web services integration, it is certainly a very significant offering that underlines the importance of content providers developing personalized content delivery services that recognize the primacy of enterprise content management tools as the context in which content is being consumed at the institutional level. As major organizations learn to leverage the power of their own content resources with ECM tools and other publishing and collaboration capabilities, vendors such as Factiva can expect to refine their "content concierge" capabilities within this user-aware environment using far more than mere taxonomy tools to refine content sets to the needs of specific users and the problems that they are trying to solve. Web services provides the easy-to-integrate modular approach to delivering such services, and is the key venue that premium sources can expect to exploit in the next few years to deliver maximum value to their institutional clients.