Integration of External Data in Document Workflows via Web Services

In recent years the adoption of systems to automatically manage information assets in networked, collaborative ways has become vital for enterprises. In this work we focus on collaborative document management systems, where actual document development relies on accessing structured data in remote repositories. Forms within documents must be filled in with proper data items: An automated support to gather the required remote data may substantially improve the overall document management process. The Web Service technology is of fundamental help in this setting, because it lets remote data be exposed to potential clients according to standard interfaces. On the other hand, document management systems must be modified to provide this new kind of data access. This paper introduces a novel approach to support remote data integration in documents handled by Content Management Systems. According to the reported experience, such a data integration can be regarded as an enabling feature for a better exploitation of document workflow systems.