ECM vendors collaborate on interoperability standard
Yesterday EMC, IBM, and Microsoft
jointly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) - a new specification designed to enable interoperability between content management repositories. The proposed standard, which was also being submitted to the open standards consortium OASIS yesterday, will create a common interface for accessing content stored in compliant repositories, simplifying the process of integrating business applications with enterprise content management (ECM) systems, particularly in a mixed environment with products from multiple ECM vendors - a situation that is common among enterprise organisations.
The core ECM focus areas for version 1.0 are collaborative content creation, and delivery of content through portals and mashups, with support for applications such as workflow/BPM, archiving, compound document management and electronic legal discovery to be built on top of the CMIS interfaces. The specification provides support for both REST- and SOAP-based interfaces.
The three primary parties in the development of the standard have been working on its development since 2006, and have since been joined by fellow competitors in the ECM space Alfresco, BEA/Oracle, OpenText and SAP.
I have to say that this is a welcome move by the ECM vendors - a standard of this kind is well overdue, and it is encouraging that so many of the leading players are on board. Clearly the implementation of such a (proposed) standard will not happen overnight - and approval of the standard by OASIS is not expected until the second half of 2009. However, we can expect the vendors involved to begin introducing CMIS-compliant code before then, especially since a key goal of the specification was to enable it to be developed as a layer that can sit on top of existing content repositories, rather than requiring them to be redeveloped from scratch (compared to the related JSR 170 standard, for example). In fact, the Alfresco website is already offering up its draft CMIS implementation for preview by the developer community.
A risk to the specification's success is that it falls into the same trap that befell the ANSI SQL standard. This provided a standard way of accessing data repositories, but allowed vendors to include their own "tweaks" which locked people in. The CMIS vendors acknowledge that CMIS is not trying to cover everything - for example security and administration is left to the individual applications - and clearly some products will have differentiating capabilities that are not covered by the standard, increasing the risk of deviation. However, despite this risk, CMIS is a positive step for the ECM market.
It is also worth noting that the standard has much wider implications than just ECM - certainly any organisations looking to implement collaboration technologies should keep an eye on the progress of the standard, and should also challenge their collaboration software providers on their plans, as CMIS should make it much easier to manage collaboratively authored content in the same way as any other organisational content.
Labels: Alfresco, CMIS, ECM, EMC, ibm, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, standards
