Basic architectures

You can set up your IBM^® Lotus Web Content Management™ environment with a combination of authoring, staging, and delivery applications to support both test and production environments.

Two-stage environments

It is recommended that at least two separate Web Content Management applications be used within a Web Content Management environment.

One Web Content Management application is used to create and manage Web content. A second Web Content Management application renders the site and delivers it to users, either via the Web Content Management servlet, or via the Web Content Management Rendering Portlet. No editing is performed on the delivery application. These could be installed on the same WebSphere Application Server, but would more often be installed on separate servers to improve performance.

Note: Syndication

Syndication is used as the transport layer that replicates data from one Web Content Management application to another. Further information can be found in the Syndication chapter later in this guide.

Three-stage environments

A third Web Content Management application can be added between the authoring application and the delivery application. This server is used as a staging application.

A staging application would mostly be used:

To aggregate changes to a Web Site over time and push these aggregated changes to the delivery application in batches.
To aggregate content from multiple authoring applications before syndicating to a delivery application.

Test and production environments

The basic architectures described above can be mirrored in two separate environments. The test environment can be used to test and review major changes to a Web Site, to test and review load-balancing, redundancy, caching and delivery strategies. Once successfully tested, these changes can be implemented in the production environment and delivered to end-users.