CMIS enters the final stretch

The Content Management Interoperability Standard is due to go to public review today, according to a post from Alfresco CTO John Newton's Tuesday. CMIS as you may recall (which we've written about frequently here) is an emerging specification that will enable companies to build applications to communicate across content management systems.

The implications of this are huge because today, without a standard, companies are forced to build their own connectors. This is time consuming and costly, and since most large organizations have multiple content management systems from multiple vendors, there has been an increasing demand from customers to make communication across repositories a simpler proposition. Amazingly, vendors like EMC, Microsoft and IBM listened, and the result was the development of the proposed CMIS standard.

It went to the Oasis standards body about a year ago and throughout that time there have been a number of releases. Newton writes that we have at last reached the final hurdle before approval. "Today, unless some catastrophic event occurs, CMIS will go into public review. This is the last step in OASIS before becoming an official standard." He expects it could take up to six months, but the bottom line is that we are very close and this is a big day for content management vendors and especially for their customers.

Companies like Alfresco and other participating members have been experimenting and building CMIS functionality into their products based on the earlier specs, and as such should be able to hit the ground running when CMIS takes that final step and becomes a standard. That these companies have been able to look past their competitive differences, to build this specification, and get it this far is a testimonial to people like Newton and others on the technical committee. They have worked hard to deliver something that all parties can agree upon.

For more information:
- see John Newton's blog post

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