October 1, 2009 - The Content Management Interoperability Specification OASIS Technical Committee has voted and approved CMIS draft 0.70b for submission to the OASIS public review process.
According to OASIS, “CMIS uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within one enterprise and between companies.”
Basically, the specification defines a common Web services interface on which developers can build applications that communicate to various content repositories.
In an upcoming Information Management article scheduled for October 8, Dmitri Tcherevik of FatWire writes that “CMIS defines a unified model for describing content resources and repositories that manage them. It also offers bindings of this model to the SOA and REST architectural patterns.”
Tcherevik believes there is a lot to like in this new standard and elaborates on one of its benefits: “To users of a Web content management product, it promises transparent access to content storied in the various content repositories directly from a Web site authoring tool.”
Considering the widespread interest from many content management vendors. Tcherevik encourages Web application developers and enterprise architects to research CMIS and do some experimentation.
Originally proposed in a joint announcement by IBM, EMC and Microsoft, other vendors including Alfresco, Day Software, Open Text, Oracle and SAP have stated their support.
AIIM reports that CMIS is already gaining traction within organizations.
And CMS Watch Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe blogs that “We have a long history of well-meaning, well-designed, and well-intentioned standards in our industry (remember ODMA and DMA anyone?) that failed to stick. CMIS seems like a good bet to succeed where others did not.”
Participation in the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee was open to all interested parties. The public review and remaining approval processes may take four months or more.
Julie Langenkamp is editor-in-chief of Information Management. She can be reached at julie.langenkamp@sourcemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JulieLangenkamp.
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