About the Publisher architecture

The following figure provides an overview of the architecture of the Publisher. Documents originate at the top of the figure in a source system. At the bottom is the publishing destination system with its users. In between is the Publisher computer.

The Publisher computer hosts the following applications:

• Publisher Queue – A simple web site that allows users to monitor documents registered in the publishing queue database. By default, the Publisher Queue can be accessed at the URL: http://<PublisherComputerName>/Publisher.
• Publisher web services – Provides remote access to the publishing queue database for client applications to register documents for publishing.
• Dex.exe – The central component of Publisher that manages all data export, rendering, and import.

Dex.exe performs the following actions when it processes a document:

1. Dex.exe is scheduled to periodically check a database to find which documents need to be published. It initiates a publishing job for each document found.
2. The document is read from the source system with a system link.
3. The document is optionally rendered to a different file format with a rendering module.
4. The document is published to the destination system with a system link.
5. After Dex.exe has finished processing the document, it provides feedback to the source system that the document was successfully published or that errors occurred during the process.

Publisher may be configured in a cluster as described in Understanding Publisher clustering.