CMIS Standard Announced

A new standard to provide for interoperability of content management systems has been launched. It's called "CMIS", for Content Management Interoperability Services.

Summary:

• Organizations often maintain a number of different content management systems
• These are often maintained by different departments, and are often application-specific
• There's a need for the repositories to share information
• IBM (Content Manager), Microsoft (SharePoint) and ECM (Documentum) have been working together for two years to define a corresponding standard
• More recently, they've been joined by Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle, and SAP
• Version 1.0 made public on September 10, 2008
• Goal is that in late 2009, the standard will be given formal approval by OASIS
• Initial target applications areas: e-discovery, archiving, compound/virtual documents
• Initial spec is intended as a foundation, and to have practical and achievable goals. Eg it defines interprocess communications (via SOAP, REST and Atom) and a basis set of APIs
• Too early to predict when any specific products will support CMIS

Thoughts:

• Much need for such interoperability
• This effort deserves industry attention and support
• Very good that three leading ECM players are driving this
• Probably sound to have initially modest goals. However, this does mean that significant functionality is missing. Eg, work has not yet started on support for categories/tags/taxonomies, and access controls. Category support is very important for e-discovery and archiving applications; and access controls are pretty important for e-discovery, archiving, and compound/virtual documents
• This work won't do much to integrate email and non-email repositories (at least at this stage). The data structures are still way too different; CMIS won't address the specific and distinctive attributes of email. Pity
• Long term, it would be nice if digital rights management capabilities could be built into CMIS

... David Ferris