Major ECM vendors send content sharing standard to OASIS today

 
EMC, Microsoft and IBM have agreed on a standard for sharing content among different data repositories and will send it to OASIS [1] today to begin the approval process. Also on board are Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP. What we have here folks is potentially a giant leap forward for the content management industry, one that has been a long time coming. In fact, the players involved have been working on this standard, known as Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) since 2006.

As Razmik Abnous, VP and CTO at EMC CMA Division points out, many companies have multiple (sometimes even hundreds) repositories as a result of purchases made by individual departments or different locations, and further complicated by mergers and acquisitions. Trying to get these different systems to communicate with one another, up until now, has been a nightmare for IT staffs, which have been forced to create one-off connectors, middleware solutions or other expensive and time-consuming work-arounds.

Ken Bisconti, VP of Product Marketing & Strategy at IBM ECM, says that while some standards have developed over time, such as the JSR170 and WebDav, these standards weren't necessarily applicable in a broad way for all vendors. That's what makes CMIS different; it gives vendors the opportunity to use a standard that works across heterogeneous systems. This should ensure interoperability for applications across multiple content repositories, so a vendor could build an application through CMIS to connect to multiple vendor repositories for archiving, workflow, e-Discovery and other operations.

CMIS also could play a role in facilitating true Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0 functionality across content repositories by building composite applications or mashups to aggregate content against disparate systems. The potential is huge, and could change the way we think about the CMS in the enterprise. Communication is key here, and this standard enables open communication while still giving each vendor the freedom to layer its own features and functions on top of the standard.

While this standard has been baking for a couple of years, it was only several weeks ago that the parties involved got together at the Microsoft campus to test and validate the design. Jeff Teper, VP of Office Business Platform for Microsoft SharePoint, says it was a rousing success, and proved to the parties involved that the standard was ready to go to OASIS. All of the other participants got together at the Microsoft campus in August for what they called Plug Fest, where they took prototypes of different implementation and mixed and matched it to make sure it all worked together. Teper reports that these tests gave the group confidence that the standard they were submitting to OASIS today was fully grounded in running code.

Abnous aptly and intelligently points out this inability to communicate across repositories has frustrated customers, and in many ways held back the industry. He hopes this will help the industry grow to its potential. He says that while we know 80 percent of the content in the enterprise is unstructured, a relatively small percentage of it is being managed by a CMS. He thinks CMIS could help change that, and while each company will implement the standard in its own unique way, customers can be assured, once it's finally approved by OASIS (a process that's expected to take about a year), that they can write applications to communicate across existing repositories, as well as new installations moving forward.

What this will mean is hard to predict right now. It's clear that the CMS vendors have seen the light and have been able to get past the needs of each individual company to the needs of the industry as a whole. The winners here should be the customers who will, by all accounts, be able to communicate across multiple disparate repositories with far less effort than is required today. Regular readers may recall last week that I wrote my Editor's Corner [2] about the need for standards to share content between different repositories. I would like to think I was clairvoyant, but truth be told Alfresco CEO John Powell hinted in a recent interview that these standards were coming. I just didn't expect to hear about them less than a week later. - Ron [3]