Alfresco 3.2 supports CMIS 1.0

November 25, 2009 — 7:29am ET | By Ron Miller

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Alfresco announced support this week for the newly minted CMIS 1.0 specification. CMIS, which provides a framework for communicating across content repositories from different CMS vendors, is currently out for public review and is expected to be ratified as a specification some time next year.

Alfresco has included support for 1.0 as a means for providing ways for customers to experiment with the latest version. John Newton, CTO at Alfresco, who has been part of the consortium of vendors creating CMIS, says CMIS is getting close. "It's a long road. We have been talking about it for a long time. It's good to see it becoming real. Not quite there, but we're very close and it's good to see the 1.0 label," he said.

Newton explained that there are still minor issues to address. Just the other day, someone asked for a clarification about some syntax used in the specification, but these are things, he says that should be worked out soon. He says it's possible it could require another public review after this one. If not, he says they are probably looking at a vote on the specification in March. Otherwise, it could be May, but the fact is it's close and that's a good thing.

CMIS will provide a way to build applications using a common interface. "We as a provider are adhering to the interface." He says all of the vendors are doing so, that third parties can build on top of that, in much the same way that database vendors can write to SQL regardless of the database type.

CMIS won't be a panacea by any means, but it does offer a way to move content between repositories fairly easily. Most large enterprise settings have content management products in place from a variety of vendors and providing a common framework to communicate across those disparate data sources, will be a huge step forward.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco press release

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