CMIS live example

Three ECM vendors and the AIIM organisation have collaborated together to design and deploy a live example of federated search utilising the Content Management Integration Standard (CMIS). This is being demonstrated at the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia in the US.

This example is also available on the web at this location:

http://www.aiim-iecm.org/CMISDemoE/Default.aspx


This is primarily a federated search and retrieve implementation of CMIS over Documentum, Nuxeo and Alfresco repositories. You can search across the repositories and then retrieve the document from your browser.

While some may say this is not stunning, this is a great test model of the standard (not yet ratified) in action. There are many organisations, especially the large ones that have multiple vendor products and therefore multiple repositories in place. The possibility of bringing these together in a federated way is an exciting possibility.

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