Microsoft ships CMIS support for SharePoint 2010

In a move that will make it easier to share content between multiple repositories, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT [1]) posted its Content Management Interoperability Services Connector for SharePoint Server 2010 last week. It is part of the SharePoint Administrator Toolkit, downloadable [2] from the Microsoft website.

It is not, however, supported by SharePoint Foundation, Microsoft's entry-level document-sharing product.

Microsoft had said in April [3], just a week before the ratification deadline for the CMIS standard, that it would ship CMIS support in late June [4]. (We can just call it June 49^th.)

Al Brown [5], an architect at IBM (NYSE: IBM [6]) who has helped define and champion CMIS, told FierceContentManagement in April that CMIS could have a similar impact on content management to what SQL [7] had on databases in the 1980s. 

"You will remember the relational database market, and what happened when they got standardized," he said at the time [3]. "The whole market grew 10 or 20 fold, maybe more because of standardization. If you can get the main parties to agree [as you have here], you [could] see it take off," he said. Microsoft was one of the original participants in the development of the specification.

The CMIS connector for SharePoint Server 2010 lets SharePoint users interact with content stored in any repository that has implemented CMIS, as well as making SharePoint 2010 content available to any application that has implemented CMIS, Microsoft said. 

Before the connector, it was possible to communicate between SharePoint 2007 and an external document repository, but it was much more complicated [8].

For more:
- download the software here [2] 

Related Articles:
CMIS approved, new products on the way [9]
AIIM 2010: CMIS standard nears approval [3]
Generis releases iGoogle CMIS gadget [10]
New Alfresco release casts a wide net [11]
Day releases CRX 2.1 with CMIS support [12]