Siebel Briefings Administration Guide > Integrating External Content >

About Content Broker

Content Broker is a Siebel Briefings feature that allows you to integrate and display content from any external source that is properly configured. This content appears in context with your Siebel data.

For example, when a user opens an Account Briefing for an account such as Acme, Inc., in addition to account data from their Siebel database—opportunities, contacts, service requests—the user also sees recent news articles related to Acme, Inc. Content Broker searches external sources, finds information related to Acme, and displays it in context with Acme data from the Siebel database.

Content Broker consists of three components:

• The Account Topic Manager. This Administration - Briefings screen view allows you to link accounts and competitors to topics. Content Broker uses topics to search external content sources. Siebel has adopted the D&B D-U-N-S Number as the topic identifier for companies. When you link accounts and competitors to topics, you associate them to the D-U-N-S Number. Siebel Briefings uses the D-U-N-S Number when searching external content sources.

  For more information on using the Account Topic Manager, see Associating Accounts with Briefings Topics.

• Content Agents. Content agents are used to specify the authentication, URL, and syntax parameters required when requesting information from external sources. You can create your own content agents for other external content sources. For more information on content agents, see Content Agents and Requests to External Content Sources.
• Siebel Company Vocabulary. Oracle's Siebel hosts this database of company identifiers based on D&B D-U-N-S numbers. For each =D-U-N-S Number in the Company Vocabulary table, Oracle also maintains other company identifiers, such as the stock ticker symbol for public companies. Figure 3 shows a conceptual view of the Siebel Content Broker.

  Figure 3. Content Broker Architecture

Using Content Broker you can define content agents and use Siebel Tools to configure Siebel Briefings objects that request data from external sources. Defining content agents in the Administration - Integration screen views gives you the flexibility to change the agents without having to recompile the Siebel repository (.srf) file or reboot the server.