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 TEST CENTER P-to-P gets to business By Maggie Biggs July 6, 2001 INTELLIGENT AGENTS will appear on the next-generation Internet to link distributed business processes and possibly tighten application integration. Technology leaders who plan to take advantage of this innovation should put the best solutions in place now to manage Web-based access to distributed content.
NXT 3 consists of seven built-in modules that work together to manage distributed content. The first of these modules is the Content Server, which aggregates and maintains access to content regardless of its format or location. We set up NXT 3 to manage the content activity of a simulated large university with multiple physical locations, departments, and users. The included administrative tools made it easy to define layouts, update processes, and maintain user access rights. For example, the students in our design classes were given rights to author and change documents, but only the instructor was given access to delete the content. You might use the access settings to easily designate a distributed group of content editors that span one or more locations. NXT 3 uses XML to support navigation as well as indexing of text and other elements. The next module, the Content Syndicator, provides the power to manage distributed content. It includes LiveSyndication Protocol, which supports content syndication in a distributed network in real time. For example, multiple publishers within our test campus created and maintained content at various locations. LiveSyndication Protocol enabled end-users in our tests to access all of that content in real time while the content itself remained at its original location. The next three modules, the ODBC Adapter, URLContent Adapter, and the File System Adapter, help support access to a wide variety of formats. Overall, these modules do a good job of supporting legacy client/server applications by enabling access to output from those applications in their native formats. We were able to easily support our test content formats, which included Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), data stored in IBM DB2 databases, and HTML and XML documents. The ODBC Adapter leverages XML and SQL to enable access to data, and we were able to index a large number of HTML pages using the URLContent Adapter. Companies that have already moved to post-PC devices or wireless technologies will find that NXT 3 supports these strategies equally well. If your devices support HTML documents they can easily be displayed. Support is also included for XML-capable devices, Extensible Style Sheets, and Cascading Style Sheets. The sixth module is the Search Engine, which proved very useful during our tests. We particularly liked two supported capabilities: conceptual searching and summarization. The Search Engine analyzes content for key points and can provide related results for users. Our students were able to examine the available content for several different types of biological data, including materials on astrobiology and molecular biology. Using the related content functionality, our test users were then able to hone in on precisely the type of biological data they needed. The final NXT 3 module is the Security Services component that supports authentication, authorization, and metering. Authentication verifies the requester. Support is included for user name, password, digital certificates, and other forms of security. We had no trouble configuring authentication and authorization parameters using the administrative interface. Metering support is provided via a C++ API. Security can be managed using an included database, LDAP directory services, or an ODBC data source, such as an Oracle database. Although NXT 3 may prove costly for budget-minded CTOs, the integrated modules, good security, and easy-to-use tools can be worth the expense. Cash-strapped strategists might also want to investigate the customization of existing solutions, such as IBM's DB2 or available open-source tools, as possible alternatives. Maggie Biggs covers a variety of enterprise computing topics.
 RELATED ARTICLES  Infiltrating the enterpriseFrom poor to powerfulRELATED SUBJECTS NetworkingSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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