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Siebel eBriefings Administration Guide > Integrating External Content >

Configuring eBriefings to Display External Content

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To integrate external content into Siebel eBriefings, you use Siebel Tools to configure applets and business components so that they can handle external content. This section describes some issues you should consider before you configure, and provides an overview of common configuration scenarios. Four main configuration tasks you must complete using Siebel Tools are explained:

Configuring a business component to handle external data
Configuring an applet to display external data
Modifying the table of contents applet
Adding the applet to a view

Instructions for creating content agents to request external data are also provided in this section.

Before You Configure

Before you begin, you need to consider the following:

Your external content provider must have an HTTP/HTML interface.
You need to know the search terms and any other parameters you need to pass to the content source to retrieve data. For example, does your content source index company information by D-U-N-S Number, stock ticker symbol, or company name?
You must define what data you want to display and where you want it to appear. For example, do you want to display headlines on the user's My Briefings page, or do you want to display headlines and abstracts of articles on the Account Briefing?

Configuration Scenarios

There are three scenarios that characterize how you might integrate external content into your Siebel eBriefings application. They describe the type of request that Content Broker places when retrieving data from an external source. The scenarios are listed here in order of complexity. Static is the least complex, and vocabulary is the most complex.

Static. In this scenario, Content Broker simply places a static request to an external content host and displays the results in a section of a Briefing document. The elements of the request do not change, and no data from the Siebel database is required.

For example, suppose A.K. Parker Distribution wants to display current headlines about the high-tech industry on users' My Briefing pages. A.K. Parker could configure Siebel eBriefings to search an external data host, say TopNews.com, for articles using the search term "high-tech" and limit the search to articles published in the last 5 days. The results could be displayed in a new section called High Tech News.

Parameterized. In this scenario, when Content Broker places a request to an external data host, it passes data from your Siebel database as a parameter. Siebel data might include the company name, SIC code, or company's address.

For example, suppose A.K. Parker Distribution purchases news from an external content host that uses the SIC code as an index. A.K. Parker wants to display account news from this source on Account Briefings. A.K. Parker could configure Siebel eBriefings so that the SIC code for the current account is extracted from the Siebel database and is passed to the content source when the request is made.

Vocabulary. In this scenario, search terms from the Siebel Company Vocabulary database are retrieved and then passed to the external content host when the request is made.

For example, suppose A.K. Parker already subscribes to a news wire called Headline News, and wants to integrate Headline News into the Account Briefing. Headline News indexes company information by stock ticker symbol. A.K. Parker could configure Siebel eBriefings to extract the stock ticker symbol for the current account from the Siebel Company Vocabulary database and pass it to the content host when the request is made.

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