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

Obsess or Obese?

Bit of a left field blog today, but I guess that is why I have the rider at the top of blog roll. Coffee is loosely related to ECM, especially on the long night proposal churn.

So, at the local supermarket they have built out a counter in the foyer that will soon open as a cafe bar. Great, except the name is "Obsess Coffee" pretty innocuous, except that my eyes and brain is having mild dyslexia every time I go in the supermarket, all I can see as I flash past is "Obese Coffee".

Will this coffee make me fat? maybe I am too fat already. For some strange reason although I read obsess my brain turns up with obese. I think that it has something to do with the black letters on a dark wood background that might not be helping me here.

Sometimes our ECM implementations get a little like the coffee bar as when they have gone all obese, but we seem to be obsessed with them. We love them because we created them but if not connected to the business drivers and business outcomes they quickly become obese repositories for information flab, created from the content rush that comes with initial enthusiasm and not long term information lifestyle change.

Recently we have been dealing with customer that still want to go direct to technology and it hard going at times to hold the line and ensure that we are advocating the right approach. To make sure that we are treating this as a business project not just a technology project.

Well I better go work on that spelling and get my brain obsessed!

ECM - MOSS 2007 How do I get going?

How do we get going with MOSS 2007. Well, Setup.exe is NOT I repeat NOT the way to get started. Why? MOSS 2007 is a great platform for collaboration and information sharing but if not planned correctly it quickly becomes a virus within the organisation with information silo's that are out of control.

Now, I am not advocating the evil empire control, but like most projects if you don't have the end in mind then failure at least comes a total surprise I guess.

Planning, especially in the information management space is hard work becuase it takes some hard thinking and some hard talking up front to get everyone on the same page, with a single view of the end game that we are heading towards. This is especially true with MOSS as you have to take into account the nature of containment in the MOSS Hierarchy.

Microsoft have some reasonable guidance and checklists on their Governance resources centre on Technet. However, this does not cover fully the information management side of getting ready, which if you don't get a good handle on will cause you pain in the long run.

Another starting point would be to look into the "Best Practices" book by Ben Curry, Bill English, Mark Schneider and the Microsoft SharePoint Team; you can find it here at Amazon. This book is a good one for both technical and business people to get a handle on the things that you need to consider with MOSS 2007 and some best practices based on real world field experience.

This is a good resource to get a handle on how to start and what to consider before SETUP.EXE.