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We’ve been building and maintaining a connector for Tridion for the last 10 years. This connector has some menus and pages on the GUI side, but also a Windows service that runs in the background. This service retrieves the content from a lot of components and prepares a package to be exported.

This is not something that can be done by pressing a click button from the FrontEnd and waiting for the result. It can take minutes to complete!

We have a new client that has Tridion as a Cloud service, not on the premises. And we are trying to adapt our connector as we don’t have access to a Windows server where we can just install that service.

We’ve been told to create a plugin that can be installed as an Add-On, but we don’t really get/know/understand how to show we build that Windows Service in the background in this add-on.

Any advice will be more than welcome. Thank you.

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The Tridion Add-ons mechanism is intended for deploying Tridion Sites extensions such as CM event handlers, UI extensions or so-called Connectors; all kinds of in-process extensions. It is not intended for deploying stand-alone applications or Windows Services.

If you need a separate Windows Service in a Tridion Cloud setup, you can't run it on the RWS-hosted Cloud servers, but you can consider running it on a separate server (in AWS Cloud) which has access to the Tridion CM API (e.g. through the WCF Core Service Basic HTTP endpoints and the Import/Export Service endpoints).

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  • You made my day, that is the best answer I could get. So, I guess I could not host that server in Azure as RWS hosted cloud servers are in AWS as you told me. Any firewall rule to access those WCF endpoints I would had to contact RWS. And I understand that deploying the GUI part of my connector would only need to build that Tridion Add-on on top. Thanks again.
    – Xavier Casals
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 18:48
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    "So, I guess I could not host that server in Azure as RWS hosted cloud servers are in AWS as you told me" - You can host this server in Azure (or even on premise), as long as you discuss with RWS Cloud team for a correct security configuration. Obviously I would recommend hosting the server "near" the AWS region where your Tridion cloud instance is running.
    – Nuno Linhares ♦
    Commented Jul 20, 2023 at 7:40
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    Adding to all that - I would recommend to talk to your customer and the RWS' Service Delivery Manager to discuss the various options. We try to be as flexible as possible in our cloud while safeguarding the servers themselves (due to the SLAs attached to the service).
    – Nuno Linhares ♦
    Commented Jul 20, 2023 at 7:57
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    BTW: As of Tridion Sites 10.0, the ECL API is also exposed as Cloud/firewall-friendly HTTP-based endpoints, so there are even more things you can do with a remote Windows Service.
    – Rick Pannekoek
    Commented Jul 20, 2023 at 11:24
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    I was not referring to the REST API in my previous comments (note that use of HTTP does not imply REST; SOAP can also be used over HTTP), but, yes, Tridion Sites 9.6 and higher also have a Core Service REST API. See docs.rws.com/1099765/104913/tridion-sites-10-main-documentation/…
    – Rick Pannekoek
    Commented Aug 21, 2023 at 10:41

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