The future of CMIS

Guest post by Laurence Hart
The past year was a good year for the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services [1] (CMIS) standard. The specification was released for public review and efforts began to build an Open Source implementation of CMIS, Apache Chemistry [2]. The next year promises to be even bigger, beginning with the second public review wrapping-up on February 17.

So what is next for CMIS as it evolves from a promising specification to an established and important standard?

Here come the clients

It has been stated before that if the repository vendors didn't support CMIS that it would fail to become an established standard. To date, repository vendor support has been strong. The next factor that will drive adoption is the creation of CMIS clients.

There are several clients that have been developed during the past year. CMIS Spaces [3] has been a popular open-source interface built using Flex-AIR. It has been tested against multiple repositories and is regularly leveraged to test new CMIS implementations repositories.

The clients that have begun to surface more recently are impressive.

An exciting client recently announced is the CMIS browser application for the Android operating system. This will allow people to access content from CMIS repositories directly from their mobile phones. It will not be long before other applications begin to be released for other mobile platforms that do more than just browse repositories.

There has also been an emergence of vendors that are building fully-functional Content Management user interfaces. Given the state of the average user interface from the repository vendors, this is potentially welcome news.

Generis has updated their existing common interface, Cara [4], to leverage CMIS in order to work against multiple repositories. WeWebU [5] has announced plans to follow suit with their OpenWorkdesk interface. These offerings represent two early attempts to commercialize on the interoperable aspects of CMIS, allowing organizations to separate the decision for the right interface from the capabilities of the underlying repository.

By the end of the year, there should be a rise in content applications that are designed around business problems supporting CMIS rather than individual repositories.

Working on CMIS 2.0

While the efforts in creating an ecosystem of clients is important, the continued evolution of CMIS is what will make the difference between it being a foundation for content applications over the next decade and just the latest in a string of content management standards.

There has been a lot of discussion around what enhancements would make the most sense for the next version of CMIS. While any new features are likely two or more years away, work will need to be started now in order for them to be included.

WebDAV Binding: There have been a lot of comments from the WebDAV community about the overlap of CMIS and WebDAV. CMIS 1.0 has two protocol bindings, Web Services and Restful AtomPub. The addition of WebDAV as a third binding would add to the utility of CMIS, especially from desktop applications.
Aspects: While not widely supported by every repository, the call for Aspects is frequently heard from technical reviewers of CMIS. There will be serious consideration of this for the next version.
Semantic Support: As the Internet moves toward the Semantic Web, the need for support to better manage Web 2.0 metadata requirements and the semantic relationship of content is becoming more important.

These are just three of the potential features for future versions CMIS. The next year will determine which ones take root and become part of the next release.

The future is now

This will be the year that CMIS establishes itself and its potential for the future is written. There is a lot of momentum and if CMIS shows signs of continued growth, that momentum should continue for the foreseeable future.

Laurence Hart is the Director of Information Management Solutions for Washington Consulting, Inc [6]. and the author of the blog "Word of Pie [7]." He is a member of the AIIM iECM committee and an outspoken advocate for the CMIS standard. He has been working in the ECM industry for 13 years, implementing software from multiple vendors.