Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

Interesting to see that a number of the big players are talking up interoperability. Not surprising as there is no "One ECM to rule them all". Although vendors would like you to believe that theirs is the best and the brightest the general "real world" deployment is that there are multiple repositories out there and will continue to be so. Microsoft has really done a great job of marketing the UI to be MOSS 2007 and this is then driving the need for more pure play vendors to inter operate. So what is CMIS ? Quoting from wikipedia

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) [1]
is a proposed standard consisting of a set of Web
services for sharing information among disparate content repositories that
seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple
content repositories. EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, SAP and Oracle have joined
forces to propose CMIS, the first Web services technical specification for
exchanging content with and between Enterprise
Content Management (ECM) systems. The proposed standard has been registered
for public comment with OASIS. [2] [3]
More
specifically, Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a technical
specification domain model (data and services) for interacting with an ECM
repository via Web Services. It provides a content management domain-specific
data model, a set of generic services that act on that data model and several
protocol bindings for these services, including: SOAP and Representational
State Transfer (REST)/(Atom).

Players that are in the ring with CMIS include

• Alfresco
• EMC Documentum
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Oracle

Some links to CMIS news and views as follows:

Alfresco Wiki - http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS
Microsoft View - http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/ecm/cmis.mspx
EMC videos on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbMvd0gVTH0

Transmision resumes - lets get digital

Life x.0 got a little busy lately and the blog posts suffered in accordance. Between responding to customer queries and proposals and family during the school holidays it was less screen time and more face time. This is a good thing, maybe I should call this "people, machine life balance".

We face some interesting times right now with the way that the global markets are tipping around like a annoying drunk after a bad party and many countries going through a change of government at the same time.

What will be around the corner? Will demand for products and services take a dive? Or will organisation realise that like never before they need to get control of the information asset that they own?

On area that always seems to have value is getting paper and getting that part of the digital food chain under control. You might call this old fashion imaging, but hey if you put in some business process with this as well you start to see some beneficial value if planned and managed correctly.

Making the paper digital and streamlining the capture and delivery process has a significant benefit to the business and the lives of the workers that struggle with the "way that is has always been done around here" current processes. An interesting article that I read in the AIIM Infonomics magazine was one about Horry County, S.C and the journey they took to go digital. This included not only the capture and digitisation of the paper, but also integration to legacy systems through the use of "application enabler" think advanced "screen scraping" here. To get a look at the article it is available through subscription to the Infonomics magazine.

MOSS 2007 - Infrastructure counts!

Like all things infrastructure is often not seen, but is essential. There is a song called "The wise man built his house upon the rock". This is very much the same with MOSS 2007. The infrastructure, hardware, storage, network that supports the database and the application software is a very essential part of the design and deployment.

A case in point is the difference that a SAN can make to a MOSS 2007 deployment where there is lots of dynamic content from a very transactional Internet facing website, along with the right kind of Internet pipe as well. The difference is the time to load and deliver the pages necessary to make a great user experience rather than a pathetic one. Here are some good links to places that will give you a start on the necessary planning.

Planning and Architecture for MOSS 2007 - Microsoft Technet
SharePoint Capacity Planning Key Info - Joel Olsen SharePoint Land Blog (recommended)
MOSS 2007 Best Practices book link - Microsoft Press