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

ECM - Information Infrastructure

"Information infrastructure" interesting term! Well this is a term that I use to try and raise awareness that like any building it is the infrastructure supports all the other ECM deployment areas.

Information infrastructure is about putting the right information thinking and planning in place to make our ECM rollout a real success. Just as in building projects the infrastructure is not sexy, but it is essential to the structure and longevity of the overall building. If you have noticed any large building project it is the initial foundations and infrastructure that seem to take the longest. But once this in place the rest seems to take off, according to the plan, so to is it with ECM projects, you need a solid information infrastructure to build on.


If I use the term "information architecture" generally people are confused, and think in terms of the web definition of architecture. This definition has more of a focus on the structure that needs to be in place for the navigation and the web side of the Manage, Process & Deliver information chain. Yes there are linkages between the overall architecture and the infrastructure part but the core fundamentals of infrastructure go well beyond just the web.

Information infrastructure encompasses the core pieces of content classification and structural metadata that must be defined in advance to ensure that there is a clear understanding of what needs to be managed and how it will be managed in a business context. Along with this understanding you also need to define and map the set of business rules that will provide the glue to the content relationships. Then once this has been put in place you can concentrate on navigation and findability as the infrastructure is now in place to make the upper layers successful.

So that is a general look at Information Infrastructure. Soon we will look at bringing some of these pieces together realitive to MOSS 2007.

ECM - MOSS Architecture.

I deal a lot with MOSS 2007 these days. I guess with $800M in sales and the massive massive marketing machine that Microsoft brings to bear you can avoid it. I believe that even Microsoft themselves have been surprised at the adoption of MOSS 2007 as a platform.

But putting that all aside what fascinates me, and drives me mad is the way that the MOSS 2007 information architecture hangs together. Why? well because I have dealt with other ECM systems before, you tend to come with some well ingrained expectations when you begin to look at MOSS. Expectations such as:

• A single repository for information that is single source, create once and find and edit anywhere


• The ability to set retention and disposal at a system level and configure for the information in context


• The ability to leverage information outside of organisational boundaries eg. have a policy document spread across all departments

So give some of these expectations I found that I had to do a mind bend when starting to dig under the covers of the MOSS platform. Microsoft has an architecture for MOSS that goes like this.

(Click the image to get an enlarged view)

From the diagram you can see that the Site Collection is the logical grouping bucket for information. Now most large organisations that deploy MOSS will have multiple site collections. But here is where the mind bend on my expectations start.


The following features of MOSS 2007 DO NOT work across Site Collections (SC's)

• Content Types - You will need to deploy content types across all other SC's
  
• Content by Query Web Part - aggregates across site(s) but not SC's
  
• Workflow - Only available to the site collection it is deployed to !!!
  
• Information Management and Retention Policies - Only set at the SC level
  
• Search - Certain features so not work across SC's
  
• Quotas - Want to control the space people use, this must be deployed across SC's as well
  

So this starts to create some interesting exercise.

Firstly for the Information Architect / records management experts as they try to make sense of how to construct a classification / metadata / security and access controls.

Secondly for the MOSS Administrators as they try to keep track of the deployment and changes to the information support features that need to be managed as well. This is a ripe area for the 3rd party developers to help and some have already identified the gap.

So the moral is, prior planning prevents a poor deployment !