Can CMIS be approved by year's end?

It's no secret that I've written frequently about the Content Management Interoperability Services, otherwise known as  CMIS (pronounced Sea-Miss) standard idea. That's why I was excited when I met Mary McRae, who is Director, Technical Committee Administration at OASIS, on Twitter. After we exchanged Tweets (the modern way to set up a business meeting), she agreed to talk to me about the OASIS approval process. Just a few weeks before I talked to Mary, I also attended a session on CMIS presented by John Newton, CTO at Alfresco and I learned some of the history behind the standard.

It's older than you think

One of my concerns was that the standard was being pushed through faster than it should, but I learned the actual idea for CMIS goes back to 2005 and began as iECM. The industry has long recognized that a lack of interoperability between content repositories was a big stumbling block for many organizations that run content management systems from multiple vendors. This effectively created content silos that could not communicate with one another, resulting in multiple sign-ons, search issues and content isolation. Finally, in August 2006 IBM, EMC and Microsoft picked up the iECM ball and it evolved into CMIS. With the weight of these three big companies behind and other major players like Open Text, Alfresco, Oracle and SAP the standard specification began to take shape.

Getting to OASIS

By October, 2007 the partners approved the working draft and submitted it to OASIS to begin the standards approval process and a technical committee was formed from the original group of petitioners. At this point, however, McRae explains, the process has to be completely open and transparent. McRae said it was clear the original group had been busy and had come to OASIS prepared, but she says, once you begin sharing the spec outside of the of the original close-knit community others can add ideas and want to expand it and that can slow the process down.

"One of the most frequently asked questions is 'how long will it take from initial TC formation to OASIS Standard?' Of course the answer is 'it depends.' On *average*, 18 - 24 months. It only takes 60 days from charter proposal submission to the first meeting, and it can take as little as five months from initial public review announcement to completion of OASIS Standard ballot, but in between there's lots of meetings, discussions, issues to be resolved, testing, more discussions, etc.," explained McRae.

Getting approved

McRae says it's possible to get approved by the end of the year, but a lot of pieces have to fall into place for that to happen. "If they feel they can get spec approved at committee draft level and off to me next month, they have shot at getting approved by the end of the year." It's pretty tight and it all depends on whether they can keep the number of objections and changes to a minimum. Of course, most of the players are more than likely working on CMIS integration right now, and should be able to hit the ground running as soon as the specification becomes an approved standards regardless, whether that's the end of this year or early 2010. - Ron