CMIS approved, new products on the way

After several years, the major content management vendors in the industry--big names like EMC, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), IBM and others--agreed last week on the Content Management Interoperability Service, otherwise known as CMIS. Some time during the last week, the vote reached the magic number 49 (which represents 15 percent of the membership) and CMIS became an official OASIS standard. It was a great day for content management.

What CMIS does in one stroke of the pen is to provide a uniform way for companies to move data across content repositories from different vendors. This is no small matter, as we have discussed here many times over the last couple of years. Without this standard, companies were forced to create a hodge podge of solutions to move data from one vendor's repository to another. This annoyed customers who often own multiple vendor solutions and tend to see their content as a single entity. It's all their content after all and they got tired of jumping through programming hoops to get access to it all.

CMIS provides a single way for all vendors to communicate among these disparate repositories. Is it a magic bullet? Probably not, but it is a huge step forward. That these competitors could get together in fairly short order, agree on the language of the specification, move it through testing and get it to market shows what happens when an industry recognizes the power of standards.

With a single process, they can now compete on other features. Some people feel this could pave the way for a content management renaissance. Freed from the contraints of content silos, the industry could blossom just as the database industry did in the 80s when SQL was developed.

Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but the potential is there. The standard has passed and it's now up to the industry to run with it. For today, at least, we can celebrate a job well done. A new standard lives.

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