The EBSCOhost Integration Toolkit enables users to access premium business content from within enterprise search applications, corporate portals and intranets. The EBSCOhost Integration Toolkit (EIT) allows corporate information professionals and IT experts to provide employees with the best content in the optimal online environment…the one already in use!

The EBSCOhost Integration Toolkit options range from simple to sophisticated, to match any integration requirement. EIT increases the value of Enterprise Search Application (ESA) investments, by integrating EBSCO’s premium databases into the corporate workflow. EIT dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of custom integration for corporate IT departments.

EIT options include:

• SharePoint: EBSCO provides pre-built web parts and How To documentation, enabling organizations to embed the EBSCOhost experience directly into their SharePoint pages. EBSCO's web parts provide targeted access to relevant and timely information needed by today's business professionals. Detailed documentation provides guidance to users choosing to create customized web parts. Because the web parts leverage existing EIT options such as RSS and web services, organizations have multiple options when choosing to deploy EBSCOhost web parts.

• Learning Management System (LMS): Targeted eLearning content provides organizations with relevant, timely information applicable to a wide variety of job and business needs within the organization. Whether used as core learning activities or as reference material for existing eLearning content, users will be well served in their daily performance support and talent development activities. All LM content is sourced from the industry's most credible authorities, such as American Bar Association, Business Week, CFA Institute, Forbes and Business 2.0.

• Persistent Links: Users can embed persistent links to the full text of specific articles from EBSCO business databases into a portal or intranet. Access to the article is seamless to the end user. The portal or intranet administrator can create, remove or change the persistent links at any time.

• RSS Feeds: Users can set up continuously updating RSS-based content feeds from EBSCO business databases. The content is presented as an active article heading, with links to the full text on EBSCOhost. Access to the content is seamless to the end user. The RSS option minimizes the bandwidth and content management burdens for the corporate portal, since the full text is only served when requested. The portal or intranet administrator can create, remove or change the RSS feeds at any time.

• Web Service (XML Gateway): The EBSCO XML Gateway is a SOAP and REST compatible web service used to establish direct links from an Enterprise Search Application (ESA) to business databases from EBSCO. The EBSCO XML Gateway provides customers with multiple integration methods, allowing them to submit customized and contextually based search and retrieval requests, as well as to tailor the format of the retrieved XML content to suit the needs of their users and internal web sites or applications. Features of the EBSCO XML Gateway include:
  • Keyword, Subject, Image, Index, and Thesaurus search
  • Article retrieval
  • SmartLinks, CustomLinks, and Persistent links
  • Support of multiple industry vocabularies including MeSH, CINAHL, ICD9, ICD10, and SNOMED-CT
  • SOAP and REST-like access
  • Secure (SSL) access – https support
  • Usage statistics reporting
  • Real-time updates

• Enterprise Search Integration (ESI): ESI makes EBSCOhost database metadata content available to an Enterprise Search Application (ESA) search index. The end result is that an ESA user can search EBSCOhost content within an integrated result list in combination with other databases and local content, under one common interface. ESAs can index millions of structured and unstructured documents from several content sources, and can utilize internal/external taxonomies to present users with a rich search experience - far exceeding today’s Federated Search products in usability. Some of the most popular ESAs include: Endeca, FAST Search, Autonomy, Northern Light, Lucene/Solr, and Google Search Appliance.

  EBSCOhost can push article metadata with links back to the full text. Databases are accessible as XML via different mediums, including FTP. Incremental updates to the content is available in new XML files. This allows ESAs to index the content on their own time, and avoids the resource intensive processes and duplicate HTTP hits associated with web crawling.