Expressroom Overview

The Expressroom content management system is the solution to complex content problems. It defines the standard for Web Content Management through a combination of powerful functionality, a scalable architecture, and the leveraging of open industry standards.

Powerful functionality
The powerful features of Expressroom cover all phases of content production. From original authoring in popular tools like Microsoft^® Word, to dynamic, just-in-time rendering and delivery that works with popular Web servers and application servers, Expressroom is the ideal interoperable solution.

Some Key Capabilities of Expressroom include:

• Separation of content and code from presentation.
  Expressroom enables different development tracks – authoring, design, development – to progress in parallel, eliminating the “Webmaster bottleneck” and producing a finished product faster.

• Efficient content re-use with instantaneous results.
  Any piece of content can be used an infinite number of times throughout a site, driving efficiencies, and lowering risks and costs. With pervasive use of XML, Expressroom pages can address and reuse any piece of content at the smallest level of granularity. With dynamic just-in-time rendering and delivery, content changes are instantaneous and do not require tedious and time-consuming merge operations, regardless of how many pages are affected by a change.

• Guaranteed publishing of approved content only.
  Flexible, user-defined workflow provides a structured and organized approval model. Expressroom provides robust graphical workflow definition tools to eliminate expensive workflow programming and scripting.
  
  
• Live preview of the final product.
  Expressroom servers provide live previews of the complete site using material from any stage of the review process – merging content, presentation, and code so that users can see the final effects of their changes at any time.

• Change and version management.
  Expressroom provides check-in/check-out and versioning for all assets – content, presentation, and code.

• Distributed management with SSL security.
  All contributors accessing the content management system, including authors, designers, developers, and system administrators, can connect securely over the Internet from any location.

• 24x7 site access for site visitors.
  Expressroom supports continuous maintenance and thus continuous site access by separating the site creation and management environment from the live environment, through the use of both staging and live servers.

• Visual design of next-level templates.
  Expressroom provides a visual tool for high-level design using the “pasteboard” metaphor popular with desktop publishing products. The Expressroom layout model allows users to combine content from different dynamic sources--XML, HTML, servlets, XSL, JSP, and so on--and place them on a single page.

• Guaranteed transactional and synchronized deployment.
  Expressroom ensures that updates are delivered at the same time to all of the live servers. If one fails, they all fail – ensuring that all of your site visitors have access to the same content at the same time.

• Rapid recovery from mistakes.
  Sitewide snapshots and rollback capabilities provide near-instantaneous emergency recovery to a known good version of the site.
  

Enterprise-ready, scalable architecture
The Expressroom architecture is component-oriented and flexible, to scale with the enterprise.

Two server-side Java components are at the heart of Expressroom:

• Asset Manager, a platform-independent server that stores content in the file system or a compatible relational database. All client applications interact with Expressroom through the Asset Manager, which provides check-in, check-out, and versioning.

• Page Server, a process that serves as a bridge between the Asset Manager and a Web or application server, accessing and rendering content into appropriate formats. With a three-tiered caching model, the Page Server offers the fastest dynamic delivery available.

The Asset Manager and Page Server can be run behind The Caucho Resin™ application server, which is bundled with Expressroom, or with a leading enterprise-strength application server.

Leverage open industry standards
The Expressroom all-Java™ software and all-XML storage model provide a number of benefits not found in competitive products using older, proprietary technologies. The Java 2 Platform enables Expressroom clients and servers to run on all popular enterprise operating systems, including Windows^®, Solaris^™, and Linux^®. Designed from the ground up around XML, Expressroom takes full advantage of the interoperability benefits of the industry-standard language for describing content.