This is a text description of syndprob.gif.

The business problem that syndicators face is sharing information through affiliate networks because the entire process is expensive and impromptu.

This illustration shows a large rectangular box labeled content. Content providers consist of corporate sites, legacy systems, and enterprise portals, each represented as smaller boxes beneath the content box. Corporate sites provide content over the Internet while an enterprise portal provides content exclusively on an intranet. Three large double-headed arrows labeled Internet and Intranet connect the content box with the three respective content provider boxes for Corporate Sites, Legacy Systems, and Enterprise Portal.

Content providers provide a variety of content. Within this large content box are nine smaller boxes each describing types of content provided, which includes: structured data from database systems, files from file systems, Web pages from Web servers, e-mail from mail servers, application data from application servers, audio data from audio servers, video data from video servers, documents from document servers, and spatial data from geo-spatial servers.

Syndicators must determine for each content provider content format, validation rules, delivery options and delivery frequency, notification rules, reporting rules, and types of monitoring. Syndicators must also determine how to integrate the content from each content provider and how to deal with a great variety of content sources.