AIIM 2010: CMIS standard nears approval

CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Services standard, is in the midst of the final voting process to make it an official OASIS standard. CMIS technical committee members speaking at AIIM 2010 said they hope to have enough votes to make it official by next month. The standard enables companies to build applications that can pull content from multiple vendor content repositories using a standard call that eliminates the need for expensive custom connectors to achieve the same goal.

Participants  believe it could have a similar impact on content management that SQL had on databases in the 1980s. Al Brown, an architect at IBM who has helped define and champion CMIS says, "You will remember the relational database market, and what happened when they got standardized. 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.

Brown described several key reasons he believes CMIS will pass and how the participating companies (which include Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Alfresco and other key industry players) came to an agreement on something that could obviously be contentious:

• They didn't try to do everything, but instead concentrated on set of common, basic functionality;
• They got all of the vendors to participate and writing code early on; and finally
• They tried to make it easy enough to enable ISVs, partners and third party developers to create applications based on the specification, and they are seeing this happening already even before the final approval process is complete.

John Newton, CTO at Alfresco added that he has seen a keen interest from systems integrators to reuse their skills across multiple projects within the same niche. He believes CMIS provides the ability to do that with a minimal amount of recoding.

Newton said for a specification that was developed as what some have called a "lowest common denominator" specification, he believes it has turned out to be surprisingly rich.

Laurence Hart of Washington Consulting showed me a proof of concept that pulled information from several different participating vendor repositories located across a variety of geographic locations, and it was able to pull the data and display it in the interface quickly. One issue that Hart pointed out was that when federating in this manner, it was hard to rank search results in a meaningful way because each site ranked its documents differently, but we are still very early on in the development process and these types of issues will be ironed out as people develop more experience with the code.

Whether CMIS can be as big as SQL, only time will tell, but it certainly has a great deal of potential to solve a common problem many companies face when pulling content from multiple vendor repositories. It will definitely be interesting to see what kinds of applications and use cases develop over time. It shouldn't be long before the specification becomes an approved OASIS standard and we can find out.

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