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Subscription Service With TeamSite

axt

Does anyone has any experience with subscription service integrated with interwoven workflow? With this service, a content change will cause someone who subscribes to the content/category to be notified (e.g. via email). Thanks.

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Gregg Faus

axt,

Are you referring to users that maintain the content or users of a website that subscribe to the website?

If it is the later, I've done a subscription service based on content generated from TeamSite.

StuFox

Hi Gfaus

We are looking at the possibility of providing a website subscription service - do you have any information available on this?

Thanks
Stu

SP5_EP1_1470_DynamicAttachments.ssd

axt

gfaus,

Yes, it's the latter. It's for users who subscribe to the website content (not for users who are authoring content).

Migrateduser

Yes, my first TeamSite-based project had some features that allowed our customers to subscribe to content. Almost all of our pages were generated w/TS Templating; and IIRC subscriptions were only made available to our customers from templated pages*. But aside from a boolean answer, having seen it done 4yrs ago, I probably can't much help with doing it.

* This was because our QA procedures only allowed automated/unreviewed changes to the site on pages that were templated and where the change was to only the content. Any other type of change had a fairly rigorous QA process to clear. Subscribing to content from any of the few non-templated pages wouldn't have made sense since none had dynamic content.

Gregg Faus

I can provide some insight how you'd go about doing this as I have a working subscription service that has content based soley from TeamSite. I've provided an attachment with some files that relate to the rest of my post. I'll refer to them as I go on. I've cut out/replaced portions of these files to protect the name of the client.

Basically there are two main parts to this service:
1) Producing the content summary of all the info authored in a specific time period
2) Developing a web application to manage the users subscribing to topics within the content

The first item is all Interwoven development. Basically you have to look at what content you want your website users to subscribe to and aggregate that into an XML file (see generate_news_subscription_info.ipl for script). I did this for a project where I took all the news and specialized sections that were managed w/ Interwoven and parsed DCR's and threw it all into an XML file (news_topic.xml). This task was scheduled nightly (nightly_news_index.bat) and produced this XML file into a workarea which was also deployed nightly. I also created a CGI that would manually index the content and deploy instantly too.

With a summary file I was able to move onto the web application side of things (item #2). The application (see Subscription Process.vsd for process model) would send out e-mails every Friday.

The app is based on ASP and SQL 2k. It handles the following:
- User registration and content subscription topics and subtopics
- Send out e-mails at a specific interval (remotely scheduled from Window Scheduler). Just an ASP page that calls stored procedures to get user and subscription info. It then matches topics/subtopics and creates an e-mail from a XSL transformation (one for HTML and the other for text only)
- Admin options to set preview subscriptions, look at subscribed users, etc...
- Plus more

That is it for the most part. I cannot give you the source to the web application. Your production environment is probably different anyways.

I'd be happy to give you more information about the TeamSite development.

-gf

axt

No problem, tgt_usa. Thanks anyway for replying and pointing out the feasibility of it.

axt

gfaus, this is very useful! Thanks!

I'm yet at the development (or even design) stage. Currently, still drafting the project plan and estimating effort needed.
But I'll definitely take a look at the scripts and get a head start on the design/development later on. Appreciate your help very much!

I know that you mentioned a little about the use of news_topic.xml, but I'm not sure what exactly the significance of this file. Do you use this xml file to list out all pages/categories that are modified/created daily?

I saw that you have news_list.xml file cited in the generate_news_subscription_info.ipl script. Do you use this xml file to list out all pages/categories that one can potentially subscribe to?

Most likely we'll use a different database other than sql2k. But if you happen to have the database schema/table structures, I'd be more than happy to look at it.

Thanks,
- Alex

Gregg Faus

The news.xml file that I refer to contains *all* the information aggregated from the subscription content I wish to make available to potential subscribers. This file (could be multiple files too) can be designed based on your topics that you make available, but I went with the topic->subtopic approach where I placed all the relevant information (title, abstract, url, etc) in a child node of a subtopic. Then I use that subtopic in the xml to match the subtopic(s) a user subscribes to. With that relationship I can then extract the info from xml document and transform it (via XSL) into an e-mail body (text or html).

You could take a number of different approaches to persisting the information. But I chose the XML approach because it is easily changed and can be formatted into various different outputs. The key is extracting the content and getting it to a production server outside of your Teamsite environment. That is why I generate the xml to a workarea and deploy it out.

I've attached a database diagram of the relevant subscription tables (the SiteUser table isn't fully listed). Take a look. This design accounts for a number of things including capturing the user-subscription relationships as well as archiving past e-mails and other related history info.

Obviously there is more to tell so ask away! Smiley Happy