CMIS slowly begins to bake

As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, perhaps it makes sense that I should use a cooking analogy to discuss the most important content management news this past year, the CMIS initiative. For some reason, this week, several writers chose to write about CMIS including Alan Peltz-Sharpe at CMS Watch [1] and Peter Hagopian at InformationWeek [2].

I first wrote about CMIS--which, I have learned from Peltz-Sharpe, has become a catchy little phrase pronounced Sea-Miss--the day IBM, Microsoft and EMC sent it to OASIS [3]. I've covered reactions from a number of angles ever since. My fellow content management writers and I keep writing about this because CMIS could solve the major issue of interoperability. This is a recognition by the major players that no content management system is an island, and if we can simply let them pass content between systems easily, it will be a major step forward for everyone.

Let's Play Nicely Together

When I spoke to vendors at the announcement, there was agreement among them that customers were clamoring for a way to pass content across systems more easily and the vendors heard them loud and clear. As John Newton said in a One on One interview [4], the vendors had to get beyond their own differences for the good of the customers and the industry. "The pain of not having a standard has to be big enough for people to overcome their natural tendency to protect their own turf. That comes when a critical mass has been reached in the market. With the ECM market now at $4B, you can argue that it is long overdue."

Pelz-Sharpe points out that one of the things that works in CMIS's favor is its simplicity. Unlike many standards, it is not complex and does not try to do too much. He says, "CMIS is all about check in/out and the ability to create, read, update and delete a document anywhere. That in fact is the beauty of CMIS, it's simple and has obvious value in larger organizations with multiple legacy systems that are currently hard coded into an ECM central repository (or two)."

Why People Remain Skeptical

Yet even for this simplicity, there remains a heavy dose of skepticism among industry experts. Stephen Powers, for instance, a Forrester analyst, agrees that CMIS is an excellent idea, he just wonders if it will ever see the light of day as a true standard. As I wrote in "Forrester analyst skeptical about CMIS [5]:" He's skeptical because he's seen more than one standard come down the pike and, essentially, be ignored. He cites JSR-170, a standard, he says, he almost never hears about when talking to Forrester clients.

And he's not alone. Even content management vendors like Day Software are being cautious and suggesting everyone wait a while because history has shown standards take time to fully bake. In fact, David Nüscheler, CTO at Day software, suggested in a recent One on One interview [6] that perhaps some vendors were putting the cart before the horse by announcing compatibility with CMIS before it was an official standard. "Having lived through specifying standards I can only say that the glamorous announcements in the early days of a specification process usually don’t pay out and turn into apologies. The standards that really make a difference today (HTTP, URI, TCP/IP...) have never come with big loud announcements when they were about to be submitted to a standards body in their 0.X versions."

Future Games

From my perspective as a humble scribe, who covers content management closely, I think this is long overdue. Asking vendors to enable you to easily pass information from one repository to another without jumping through major programming hoops is not too much to ask. And the vendors who defined this specification were careful to limit it to ensure it would not run into roadblocks when it moved through the OASIS standards approval process.

To be sure, as Forrester analyst Powers points out, it is not fully baked and it will take time to sort out the details. But I see a future with a CMIS standard and sooner, rather later, because it's customer driven, not industry driven. In an uncertain economy, you can be sure vendors can put aside their differences and give the people what they want, and they want this standard...as soon as possible. - Ron [7]