The Cover PagesThe OASIS Cover Pages: The Online Resource for Markup Language Technologies
SEARCH | ABOUT | INDEX | NEWS | CORE STANDARDS | TECHNOLOGY REPORTS | EVENTS | LIBRARY
SEARCH
Advanced Search
ABOUT
Site Map
CP RSS Channel
Contact Us
Sponsoring CP
About Our Sponsors
NEWS
Cover Stories
Articles & Papers
Press Releases
CORE STANDARDS
XML
SGML
Schemas
XSL/XSLT/XPath
XLink
XML Query
CSS
SVG
TECHNOLOGY REPORTS
XML Applications
General Apps
Government Apps
Academic Apps
EVENTS
LIBRARY
Introductions
FAQs
Bibliography
Technology and Society
Semantics
Tech Topics
Software
Related Standards
Historic
Last modified: November 11, 2010
Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

CMIS Logo

Recent Publication Milestones: On May 04, 2010, OASIS announced that members had voted to approve the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 specification as an OASIS Standard. Contributing sponsor members included Adobe, Alfresco, ASG, Booz Allen Hamilton, Day Software, dotCMS, EMC, FatWire, fme AG, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, Liferay, Microsoft, Nuxeo, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Saperion, WeWebU, and others. See details below.

On April 01, 2010, a posting "CMIS v1.0 Submitted for OASIS Standard Approval Ballot" from OASIS announced that an approved Committee Specification 01 for Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 was submitted for consideration as an OASIS Standard. See the CMIS Version 1.0 summary. Statements of successful use for CMIS 1.0 were provided by John Newton (Alfresco), Martin Hermes (SAP), and Florent Guillaume (Nuxeo). See details on CMIS v1.0 CS 01 below.

On January 28, 2010, the CMIS Technical Committee released an approved 'Committee Draft 06' as a Public Review Draft of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0. The public review period was scheduled to run through February 12, 2010. This CD-06 version incorporates changes to the specification made in light of comments on the 'Committee Draft 04' public review release, which ended December 22, 2009. Changes are diff-marked in red. Source: 'Committee Draft 06' (HTML); see also the Word/.doc editable source and PDF, with the announcement. Earlier: Members of the CMIS TC released Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 'Committee Draft 04' for 60-day Public Review, open for comment through December 22, 2009. See details in the Cover Pages news story.

Overview

On October 06, 2008, OASIS issued a public call for participation in a new technical committee chartered to define specifications for use of Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information sharing across content management repositories from different vendors. The OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC will build upon existing specifications to "define a domain model and bindings that are designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. The TC will not prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Rather it will seek to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by an ECM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities."

As of May 17, 2010, the CMIS technical work had received broad support through TC participation, industry analyst opinion, and declarations of interest/implementations from major companies — for commercial and open source software. Some of these include Active Endpoints, Adobe, Adullact, AIIM, Alfresco, Amdocs, Anakeen, Apache Software Foundation, ASG Software Solutions, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Citytech, Content Technologies, Day Software, dotCMS, Drupal, Ektron, EMC, EntropySoft, ESoCE-NET, Exalead, FatWire, Fidelity, Flatirons, fme AG, Generis, Genus Technologies, Greenbytes GmbH, Harris, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, Joomla!, KnowledgeTree, Lexmark, Liferay, Magnolia, Mekon, Microsoft, Middle East Technical University, Nuxeo, O3Spaces, Open Text, Optaros, Oracle, Pearson, Quark, RSD, SAP, Saperion, Structured Software Systems (3SL), Sun Microsystems, Tanner AG, TIBCO Software, Vamosa, Vignette, WeWebU Software, and Zia Consulting. Early commentary from industry analysts and software engineers is positive about the value proposition in standardizing an enterprise content-centric management specification. The OASIS announcement of November 17, 2008 includes endorsements.

Principal use cases motivating the CMIS technical work include collaborative content applications, portals leveraging content management repositories, mashups, and searching a content repository. Subject to TC vote, the members may also address additional use cases like core ECM repository capabilities; collaborative content applications; portals leveraging content management repositories; mashups utilizing content; workflow and BPM-centric applications utilizing content; content archival applications; compound and virtual documents applications; electronic and legal discovery of content applications; records management and compliance; digital asset management applications; web content management applications; information rights management applications; desktop integration of content management repositories.

Core deliverables produced by the CMIS technical committes will build upon Input Specifications to be contributed at the commencement of TC work. In particular, the TC will accept as input Version 0.5 of the September 2008 CMIS specification as published by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. Proposed specification titles include Content Management Interoperability Standard, Domain Model Content Management Interoperability Standard, Web Service Binding Content Management Interoperability Standard, and REST/Atom Binding.

Initial TC proposers include representatives from OASIS member companies Alfresco, Day Software, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP AG. The Convenor (Al Brown, IBM) was scheduled to lead an intial meeting of the TC on November 10, 2008, to be held as a conference call. The TC operates under the OASIS RF on RAND IPR Mode. Persons eligible to become voting members at the first meeting of the CMIS TC included: Al Brown (IBM), Mark Carlson (Sun), Derek Carr (IBM), David Caruana (Alfresco), David Choy (EMC), Scott Conroy (Individual), Cornelia Davis (EMC), Doug Domeny (Ektron), Kevin Dorr (Flatirons), Dustin Friesenhahn (Microsoft), Gary Gershon (Individual), Paul Goetz (SAP), Ethan Gur-esh (Microsoft), Dennis Hamilton (Individual), Martin Hermes (SAP), Jens Hübel (Open Text), Gershon Janssen (Individual), John Volker (Saperion), Ijonas Kisselbach (Vamosa), Gregory Melahn (IBM), Pat Miller (Microsoft), Florian Müller (Open Text), John Newton (Alfresco), David Nuescheler (Day), Mark Poston (Mekon), Norrie Quinn (EMC), Craig Randall (EMC), Patrick Ryan (IBM), Patrick Ward (Booz Allen Hamilton).

According to the CMIS TC statement of purpose:

"Historically, content management systems were purchased for specific application uses and this led to islands of incompatible systems. The lack of a standard interface to content management systems made it difficult to integrate content from multiple repositories into a single application such as a portal, CRM system, or office desktop. It also made it difficult for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and integrators to build applications that supported multiple content management systems consistently or easily.

The purpose of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC will define a domain model including a data model and abstract capabilities for Content Management (CM) and a set of bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories/systems and that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories for the set of use cases below. These capabilities and interfaces will not match every existing content management system and may require some level of change to existing products, at least in terms of conforming existing interfaces to those defined here. However, it is an explicit goal that CMIS Domain Model and Bindings will NOT require major product changes or significant data model changes in existing major CM repositories.

From the CMIS TC Charter and Call For Participation

The complete (hyper)text of the CMIS TC Call for Participation is also available online. It explains eligibility requirements for becoming a participant in the TC at the first meeting, and indicates how to join the CMIS TC.

OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC

1A Name of the TC

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee

1B Statement of Purpose

Historically content management systems were purchased for specific application uses and this led to islands of incompatible systems. The lack of a standard interface to content management systems made it difficult to integrate content from multiple repositories into a single application such as a portal, CRM system, or office desktop. It also made it difficult for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and integrators to build applications that supported multiple content management systems consistently or easily.

The purpose of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC will define a domain model including a data model and abstract capabilities for Content Management (CM) and a set of bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories/systems and that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories for the set of use cases below. These capabilities and interfaces will not match every existing content management system and may require some level of change to existing products, at least in terms of conforming existing interfaces to those defined here. However, it is an explicit goal that CMIS Domain Model and Bindings will NOT require major product changes or significant data model changes in existing major CM repositories.

As such, the CMIS TC should define a domain model and bindings that are designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. This TC should not prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. This TC is intended to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by an ECM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities.

1C Scope of Work

The TC will accept as input Version 0.5 of the CMIS specification as published by EMC, IBM and Microsoft on September 10th, 2008. The specification is located at:

Other contributions and changes to the input documents will be accepted for consideration without any prejudice or restrictions and evaluated based on technical merit in so far as they conform to this charter.

The initial set of deliverables will be targeted for the following use cases:

  • Collaborative Content Applications
  • Portals leveraging Content Management repositories
  • Mashups
  • Searching a Content Repository

The following use cases should be able to be supported by CMIS Domain Model and Bindings, but are not primary drivers:

  • Workflow and Business Process Management (BPM)-centric applications utilizing Content
  • Archival Applications
  • Compound and Virtual Documents
  • Electronic and Legal Discovery

The following use cases are out of scope for the initial set of deliverables:

  • Records Management (RM) and Compliance
  • Digital Asset Management (DAM)
  • Web Content Management (WCM)
  • Subscription and Notification Services

Also, this TC will engage in maintenance of the specifications produced by this TC.

The tasks of the TC include:

  • To articulate the principles of the interoperable content management through formal specifications
  • To assess the relationship of CMIS to other related standards and industry efforts. These include Java Content Repository (JCR) (JSR-170, JSR-283), WebDAV and its related specifications including DASL, Search Web Services TC, and other relevant standards.
  • To define appropriate specifications for interoperable content management
    • Including schemas, such as XML Schema Definition (XSD)
    • Including service definitions, such as Web Service Definition Language (WSDL)
  • To standardize the common types of entities and capabilities in CM
  • To encourage cooperation within and between the various topical domains and groups

After the first set of deliverables, the TC will continue to work on the next versions of the specification. Specific functional content of the next versions will be determined by a TC vote. The next versions may address the following use cases:

  • Core ECM Repository capabilities
  • Collaborative Content Applications
  • Portals leveraging Content Management repositories
  • Mashups utilizing Content
  • Workflow and BPM-centric applications utilizing Content
  • Content Archival Applications
  • Compound and Virtual Documents applications
  • Electronic and Legal Discovery of Content applications
  • Records Management and Compliance
  • Digital Asset Management Applications
  • Web Content Management Applications
  • Information Rights Management applications
  • Desktop Integration of Content Management repositories

The TC MAY define other bindings explicitly listed below after the first deliverable:

  • Web Services
  • REST
  • JSON-RPC
  • XMPP
  • JMS
  • JCA
  • SMTP

Maintenance

Once the TC has completed work on a deliverable and it has become an OASIS standard, the TC will enter "maintenance mode" for the deliverable.

The purpose of maintenance mode is to provide minor revisions to previously adopted deliverables to clarify ambiguities, inconsistencies and obvious errors. Maintenance mode is not intended to enhance a deliverable or extend its functionality.

The TC will collect issues raised against the deliverables and periodically process those issues. Issues that request or require new or enhanced functionality shall be marked as enhancement requests and set aside. Issues that result in the clarification or correction of the deliverables shall be processed. The TC shall maintain a list of these adopted clarifications and shall periodically create a new minor revision of the deliverables including these updates. Periodically, but at least once a year, the TC shall produce and vote upon a new minor revision of the deliverables.

1D List of Deliverables

The initial set of deliverables and projected duration:

  • CMIS Domain model specification (September 2009)
  • CMIS SOAP-based Web Services binding specification (September 2009)
  • CMIS REST/Atom-based Web Services binding specification (September 2009)

1E IPR Mode

The IP mode for the TC will be RF on RAND.

1F Audience for the TC

The primary audience for the final output of this TC includes ECM and BCS [Basic Content Services] application architects and ECM [Enterprise Content Management] repository architects and implementers.

1G Language

The language in which the TC shall conduct business:

English

Additional Information

Section 2: Non-normative Information

2A Similar or Applicable Work

Identification of similar or applicable work that is being done in other OASIS TCs or by other organizations:

  • WebDAV: Not targeting ECM and does not provide a CM domain model
  • JCR: Java based specification and does not specify a protocol

2B First Meeting

Date, time and place of the first TC meeting:

12PM EST/9AM PST, 10 November 2008, conference call

2C Schedule

Ongoing meeting schedule:

The CMIS TC will meet by telephone every other week at Monday 9AM PST. The time, date and recurrence of the periodic phone call will be confirmed at the first TC meeting. The meetings will last no more than two hours. The CMIS TC will hold face-to-face meetings three (3) times a year for three days starting:

1/26/2009 (Redmond, Washington, hosted by Ethan Gur-esh, Microsoft)

2D Proposers

Names and email addresses of members (minimum three [Eligible Persons]):

2E Convenor

Al Brown, IBM, albertcbrown@us.ibm.com

2G Input Specifications

  • CMIS Part I — Domain Model v0.5
  • CMIS Part II — Web Services Binding v0.5
  • CMIS Part II — REST-Atom Binding v0.5
  • CMIS — Appendices v0.5

Specifications available at:

2I Proposed Specification Titles

  • Content Management Interoperability Standard
  • Domain Model Content Management Interoperability Standard
  • Web Service Binding Content Management Interoperability Standard
  • REST/Atom Binding

Comments on the CMIS TC Proposed Charter

Comments on the CMIS Proposed Charter posted to the 'oasis-charter-discuss' list, with disposition in the CMIS Comment Resolution Log.

  • IPR Mode. Dennis E. Hamilton (dennis.hamilton@acm.org): "I am curious about the value that 'RF on RAND' has in contrast with maximizing assurance of easy entry into an integration model..." Response: "Al: Thank you for the feedback. The goal is the widest use possible. However, the proposers have already agreed to RF on RAND and we are unlikely to get the same or larger group with RF on Limited."

  • Scope. Jeff Mischkinsky (jeff.mischkinsky@oracle.com): "I have a concern that the charter IPR scope is too unbounded with respect to future versions of the the spec (after the first deliverable) for some companies to make a proper determination on whether to join or not..." Response: "Al: Thank you for the feedback on the IPR issue around future versions. The charter has been updated to resolve this issue."

  • Search Web Services. Kerry Blinco (kblinco@powerup.com.au): "Can I suggest that the CMIS TC also look at the work being done by the OASIS Search Web Services TC when assessing the relationship of CMIS to other efforts as the work currently being undertaken by this TC. The Search Web Services TC is developing Web services definitions for search and retrieval applications..." Response: "Al: Thank you for the awareness of this TC. Search Web Services TC has been added to the charter as a potential interesting related standard. The TC when it first meets will discuss which standards to coordinate with and at which levels."

  • WebDAV Search. Dennis E. Hamilton (dennis.hamilton@acm.org): "I see that the WebDAV SEARCH (formerly known as DASL) has been accepted as an IETF Proposed Standard... I notice that Search within a CM repository is not explicitly mentioned in the CMIS scope as either in- or out-of scope..." Response: "Al: Thank you. The charter has been updated to also include WebDAV search, DASL, explicitly. The TC when it meets will discuss interacting with WebDAV and DASL. The focus of the TC is for providing specification around common Enterprise Content Management (ECM) functionality and thus a searching paradigm designed for that environment. Search also has been added as an explicit use case."

  • Overall Design. Gary Gershon (gary.gershon@imergeconsult.com): "The proposed CMIS TC is building upon a substantial base of trail-blazing work accomplished by the convening companies... I would like to encourage the CMIS technical committee leadership to devote sufficient attention in the design of the TC deliverables to embrace several core SOA architectural principles..." Response: Al: These are great tenets and the TC should give them due thought. This will be referred to the TC for consideration during its work.

  • Java JSR 170 and 283. William Cox (wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com): "I urge the proposed TC to revisit the importance of Java JSR 170 and 283. Speaking for JSR170, the work did a good job of establishing common interfaces to the major content management systems..." Response: "Al: Thank you. JSR 170 and 283 (JCR) is an important standard and the TC has in its charter to interact with JCR. We might potentially combine efforts where that makes sense. I have started the discussion with David Nuescheller from JSR-283 who has been quite helpful. JCR's domain model might not be a good starting place for the services this TC wants to specify. Please see the draft specification. The TC when it first meets will discuss the level of interaction with JCR."

  • Java JSR 170 and 283. William Cox (wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com): "The last paragraph of section 1B is an excellent description of the work done (in the Java domain) on JSR 170. I suggest a clear statement that alignment with the model and interfaces of the JSRs for CMIS as part of the charter..." Response: [preceding]

  • Acronyms. William Cox (wtcox@CoxSoftwareArchitects.com): "Please spell out acronyms, e.g., ECM and BCS and ECM..." Response: "Al: Thank you."

  • Also on Java JSR 170. Rex Brooks (rexb@starbourne.com) [re: "I urge the proposed TC to revisit the importance of Java JSR 170 and 283.." — (Rex) "Having worked on v1.0 and much of v2.0 of WSRP before it got a bit bogged down prior to completing work and achieving approval, I heartily concur." Response: "Al: See above."

Related Specifications and Implementations

  • Java Content Repository (JCR): "Content Repository API for Java (JCR) is a specification for a Java platform API for accessing content repositories in a uniform manner. The content repositories are used in content management systems to keep the content data and also the meta-data used in CMS such as versioning meta-data. A JCR is a type of Object Database tailored to the storage, searching, and retrieval of hierarchical data. The JCR API grew out of the needs of content management systems, which require storage of documents and other binary objects with associated metadata. However the API is applicable to many types of applications. In addition to object storage the JCR provides APIs for versioning of data, transactions, observation of changes in data, and import or export of data to XML in a standard way..."

    JSR 170: Content Repository for Java technology API "specifies a standard API to access content repositories in Java 2 independently of implementation. Specification Lead is David Nuescheler (Day Software, Inc). The API should be a standard, implementation independent, way to access content bi-directionally on a granular level within a content repository. A Content Repository is a high-level information management system that is a superset of traditional data repositories. A content repository implements 'content services' such as: author based versioning, full textual searching, fine grained access control, content categorization and content event monitoring. It is these 'content services' that differentiate a Content Repository from a Data Repository. Many of today's (web) applications are interacting with a content repository in various ways. This API proposes that content repositories have a dedicated, standard way of interaction with applications that deal with content. This API will focus on transactional read/write access, binary content (stream operations), textual content, full-text searching, filtering, observation, versioning, handling of hard and soft structured content..."

    JSR 283: Content Repository for Java Technology API Version 2.0 aims to further expand and refine the Content Repository for Java Technology API specification based on feedback from the community. Specification Lead is David Nuescheler (Day Software, Inc). The aim is to produce a content repository API that provides an implementation independent way to access content bi-directionally on a granular level. In particular, the following functional areas will be reviewed by the expert group for possible inclusion in version 2.0: (1) Extensions in the area of management of a content repository such as access control management, workspace and nodetype management, retention aspects of content or repository construction patterns. (2) Improvement of content repository interoperability through the addition of new standardized node types, including node types for meta information and internationalization. (3) Extensions to content modelling capabilities. (4) Federation, cross-repository and cross-workspace functionality. (5) Active development of existing query-languages, versioning and observation. (6) Remoting and client/server protocol mappings...

    "Apache Jackrabbit is a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR). A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. Typical applications that use content repositories include content management, document management, and records management systems."

    Note below: Apache Jackrabbit: 'jcr-cmis sandbox' and 'jcr-cmis implementation'.

  • Apache Sling. Apache Sling (in incubation at Apache as of 2008-10) "is a web framework that uses a Java Content Repository, such as Apache Jackrabbit, to store and manage content. Sling applications use either scripts or Java servlets, selected based on simple name conventions, to process HTTP requests in a RESTful way. The embedded Apache Felix OSGi framework and console provide a dynamic runtime environment, where code and content bundles can be loaded, unloaded and reconfigured at runtime. As the first web framework dedicated to JSR-170 Java Content Repositories, Sling makes it very simple to implement simple applications, while providing an enterprise-level framework for more complex applications..."

  • WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) defines a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers. Wikipedia: "The WebDAV protocol allows 'Intercreativity,' making the Web a readable and writable medium, in line with Tim Berners-Lee's original vision.[1] It allows users to create, change and move documents on a remote server (typically a web server or 'web share'). This is useful for authoring the documents that a web server serves, but it can also be used for storing files on the web, so that the files can be accessed from anywhere. The most important features of the WebDAV protocol are: locking ('overwrite prevention'); properties (creation, removal, and querying of information about author, modified date, etc.); name space management (ability to copy and move Web pages within a server's namespace); and collections (creation, removal, and listing of resources). Most modern operating systems provide built-in support for WebDAV. With a fast network and the right client, it is almost as easy to use files on a WebDAV server as those stored in local directories..."

    DASL (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning [WebDAV] SEARCH) is an application of HTTP/1.1 forming a lightweight search protocol to transport queries and result sets that allows clients to make use of server-side search facilities. It is based on the expired internet draft for DAV Searching & Locating. DASL minimizes the complexity of clients so as to facilitate widespread deployment of applications capable of utilizing the DASL search mechanisms..."

    Note below: HTTP and CMIS relationship to WebDAV.

  • OASIS SRU/CQL Specifications being created by members of the OASIS Search Web Services TC build upon earlier specifications, including SRU, a web service based in part on the NISO/ISO Search and Retrieval standards; the Amazon OpenSearch, which defines a means of describing and automating search web forms; as well as many proprietary definitions (e.g. the Google and MSN Search APIs). There are also a number of activities for defining abstract search APIs that can be mapped onto multiple implementations either within native code or onto remote procedural calls and web services, such as ZOOM (Z39.50 Object Oriented Model); SQI (Simple Query Interface), an IEEE standard developed for searching and retrieval in the IMS (Instructional Management Systems) space; and OSIDs (Open Service Interface Definitions from the Open Knowledge Initiative..."

  • Atom is referenced in one of the Input Specifications to the CMIS TC: Content Management Interoperability Services. Part II: REST Protocol Binding. Specifically: (1) The Atom Syndication Format, IETF Request for Comments #4287 and The Atom Publishing Protocol, IETF Request for Comments #5023. The CMIS REST binding has one mode: Pure-ATOM following naming conventions and additional information in ATOM documents The client will request the service document at the URL provided by vendor. The client will then choose a collection, and then start accessing the repository. The URI for different items are found off of the atom feed document in the link tags for operations Atom or APP does not natively support. The tags have special names that denote meaning with the CMIS: prefix. Optional parameters are passed in as HTTP headers. Custom properties will be part of the CMIS namespace using generic property tags. Special collections have been created that have semantic meaning beyond collection membership. These are: (a) Unfiled: All documents added to this collection will be removed from all other collections (b) Checkedout: All documents added to this collection will be checkedout...

  • SOAP is referenced in one of the Input Specifications to the CMIS TC: Content Management Interoperability Services. Part II: SOAP Protocol Binding. "All services and operations defined in Part I of the CMIS specification are presented in this SOAP binding. The WSDL for these SOAP-based web services can be found [online]. The WSDL for these services reference two XSD documents. One defines elements for the primary data types of documents, folders, relationships and policies as well as collections of these types of objects. Section 3.0 defines the mapping between all relevant pieces of the domain model as described in Part I of the CMIS specification. The second XSD defines the message formats for each of the CMIS services; the messages often refer to the data types defined in the first XSD schema. The WSDL presents exactly the abstract services defined in the services section of Part I of the CMIS specification... For authentication: A CMIS SOAP binding MUST support WS-Security 1.1 and Username Token Profile 1.1. A CMIS SOAP binding SHALL comply with WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and Basic Security Profile 1.0. A CMIS SOAP binding SHALL comply with WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and Basic Security Profile 1.0..."

  • Open Document Management API (ODMA): "The Open Document Management API (ODMA) simplifies integration and interoperability of standard desktop applications with document management systems. Using ODMA, desktop applications access and manipulate documents carried in document management systems as easily as if they are residing in the locally-accessible file system. The ODMA Interoperability Exchange is part of the AIIM DMware Interoperability Exchange for open-source support of document system interoperability."

    ODMA, according to Wikipedia, "is an API that simplifies the communication of desktop applications with document management systems (DMS). ODMA standardizes the access to the DMS, which makes getting to these files as easy as if the files were in the actual local file system. ODMA was an effort to standardize the API to be used by desktop applications on Microsoft Windows to interface with back-end, server based document management systems (DMS). Version 1.0 of the API specification was completed in 1994, and went on to be supported by many of the major DMS vendors. Version 2.0 of the specification was completed in 1997. ODMA has subsequently been superseded by other, more standard ways of interfacing, such as WebDAV..." [Note: NuovoDoc 2008-07-20 said: "ODMA has done its job; now ODMA is fading away."]

Publication of CMIS by ECM Vendors

On September 10, 2008, Enterprise Content Management vendors EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation announced the publication of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), distributed as a ZIP archive with four prose documents and a collection of schemas, WSDLs, and XML instances. According to the published Introduction, the CMIS standard is intended to "define a domain model and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. The CMIS interface is designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. It is not intended to prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those CM systems, nor to exhaustively expose all of the CM system's capabilities through the CMIS interfaces. Rather, it is intended to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by a CM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities..."

CMIS uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. "The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multivendor, multirepository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to talk to one another..."

CMIS has been in development for two years, culminating in a vendor software interoperability Plugfest in August 2008 in Redmond, WA. Working together since late 2006, the three companies were joined in the creation of the CMIS draft specification by other leading software providers including: Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. A final gathering of all seven companies was recently held to validate interoperability of the specification before submission to OASIS."

Alfresco has now announced the availability of the first Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft implementation from Alfresco Labs. The Draft CMIS Implementation is freely available for download. It offers support for the CMIS REST and Web Services bindings allowing client applications to connect to, navigate, read, and create content against the Alfresco content repository. It also supports the CMIS Query Language providing SQL-like querying of the repository including location, properties, and full-text. A CMIS Test Suite is provided to allow compliance compatibility testing against any CMIS compliant REST Binding."

An announcement from Open Text reports that Open Text has worked with SAP AG to "create a prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services... With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organize information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface. Open Text is a member of the group of companies working to develop the standard."

"The objective of the CMIS standard is to define a common content management web services interface that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories. These capabilities and interfaces will not match every existing content management system and may require some level of change to existing products, at least in terms of conforming existing interfaces to those defined here. However, it is an explicit goal that CMIS will not require major product changes or significant data model changes like other standards such as JSR 170 have required..."

"The CMIS standard will expose core/common ECM repository capabilities in an intentionally generic way. These will allow for applications to be constructed that can work with content residing in one or more ECM repositories, without having to understand implementation differences between the individual repositories or worrying about interface inconsistencies between the repositories... Thusly:

CMIS relies on a SOA interface to provide connections to disparate content repositories

While most/all of the capabilities that will be exposed via CMIS generally fall into the core/basic functions of an ECM repository, the goal of this standard is to ensure that ECM applications can be built on top of the CMIS interfaces that enable richer/business critical applications and use cases, like Business Process Management and Electronic Discovery. Because those application use cases have been under consideration through the CMIS design process, CMIS will enable ECM applications to focus on solving business logic problems at the application-level without worrying about the implementations of specific ECM repositories...

"By providing a services-oriented architecture for interacting with an ECM repository, ECM applications can use CMIS to be loosely-coupled to individual repositories, rather than more tightly integrated. This will make it simpler for (a) applications to use CMIS interfaces 'a la carte' rather than having to having to invoke the full-set of CMIS interfaces, and (b) allow applications to be built in a Services Oriented Architecture.

According to the published "Overview of Content Management Interoperability Services 1.0," CMIS "defines four base types of objects that exist within a Repository, where the Repository can define additional Object Types for any of these type of objects. An Object Type specifies the schema of Properties that are allowed or required for the object. (1) Documents represent individual content objects in the repository. A Document may or may not include one content-stream. (2) Folders represent organizational containers in which Documents (or other folders) can be stored.(3) Relationships represent loose relationships between exactly two (2) objects (documents or folders) in the Repository. (4) Policies represent administrative policies that may be applied to objects."

CMIS "exposes services for:

  • Discovering Object Type definitions and other Repository information — including which optional capabilities are supported by a particular Repository
  • Creating, Reading, Updating, and Deleting objects
  • Filing Documents into zero, one, or more Folders — if the repository supports the optional multi-filing capability
  • Navigating and traversing the hierarchy of folders in the Repository
  • Creating versions of Documents and accessing a Document's version history
  • Querying a repository to retrieve one or more objects matching user-specified search criteria, including full-text search queries"

Document objects can be versioned, but 'folder', 'relationship', and 'policy' objects are not versioned. All methods for referring/retrieving a Document can specify whether they refer to a specific version of a Document, or should always retrieve the latest version.

A CMIS Repository has the option of supporting multi-filing of Documents into zero, one, or more than one folder concurrently. Folders can never be multi-filed. The Repository's level of support for multi-filing will be exposed to applications through the Repository service..."

On September 10, 2008, OASIS member companies submitted a proposed charter for a new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee. Based upon Version 0.5 of the CMIS specification, the TC would "define a domain model including a data model and abstract capabilities for Content Management (CM) and a set of bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories/systems and that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories."

Bibliographic Information: CMIS Version 0.5

The complete CMIS Version 0.5 download is available from the Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Microsoft web sites in ZIP format. Individual files/packages are also available from the SAP web site. The ZIP distribution contains four (4) principal prose documents in both PDF and XPS format:

See the file listing for the CMIS version v0.5 ZIP distribution, which also includes a 'Schema' directory with six XML Schema files (APP.xsd ATOM4CMIS.xsd; CMIS.xsd; cmisMessageTypes.xsd; xhtml1-strict.xsd; xml.xsd), eleven sample XML files (Example-AllowableActions.xml; Example-DocumentEntry.xml; Example-DocumentPWCEntry.xml; Example-FolderChildren.xml; Example-FolderDescendants.xml; Example-FolderEntry.xml; Example-PolicyEntry.xml; Example-Query.xml; Example-RelationshipEntry.xml; Example-Service.xml; Example-Type.xml), and eight WSDLs (DiscoveryService.wsdl; MultiFilingService.wsdl; NavigationService.wsdl; ObjectService.wsdl; PolicyService.wsdl; RelationshipService.wsdl; RepositoryService.wsdl; VersioningService.wsdl). Note also [probably to be changed] xmlns:cmis="http://www.cmis.org/2008/05

  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Part I: Introduction, General Concepts, Data Model, and Services. Version 0.5. 76 pages. Copyright © EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation. Download PDF. Available in XPS format from the complete CMIS Version 0.5 download.

    This 'Part I' document presents the problem statement: "According to Forrester and other major consultants, most companies have multiple content management systems from different vendors. It is common to see large companies running IBM Content Manager, IBM FileNet P8, EMC Documentum in the data center and Microsoft SharePoint on departmental servers. Historically content management systems were purchased for specific application uses and this led to islands of incompatible systems. The lack of a standard interface to content management systems made it difficult to integrate content from multiple repositories into a single application such as a portal, CRM system, or office desktop. It also made it difficult for ISVs and integrators to interface to multiple content management systems consistently..."

  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Part II: REST Protocol Binding. Version 0.50. 79 pages. Copyright © EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation. Download PDF. Available in XPS format from the complete CMIS Version 0.5 download.

    "The REST binding has one mode: Pure-ATOM following naming conventions and additional information in ATOM documents The client will request the service document at the URL provided by vendor. The client will then choose a collection, and then start accessing the repository. The URI for different items are found off of the atom feed document in the link tags for operations Atom or APP does not natively support. The tags have special names that denote meaning with the CMIS: prefix. Optional parameters are passed in as HTTP headers. Custom properties will be part of the CMIS namespace using generic property tags. Special collections have been created that have semantic meaning beyond collection membership. These are: (a) Unfiled: All documents added to this collection will be removed from all other collections (b) Checkedout: All documents added to this collection will be checkedout... In a REST based model, entities are mapped to resources that then have operations performed on them. This is the corner-stone of the REST model. In atom, these resources are exposed as links on feed and entry documents...

  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Part II: SOAP Protocol Binding. Version 0.5. 37 pages. Copyright © EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation. Download PDF. Available in XPS format from the complete CMIS Version 0.5 download.

    "All services and operations defined in Part I of the CMIS specification are presented in this SOAP binding. The WSDL for these SOAP-based web services can be found [online]. The WSDL for these services reference two XSD documents. One defines elements for the primary data types of documents, folders, relationships and policies as well as collections of these types of objects. Section 3.0 defines the mapping between all relevant pieces of the domain model as described in Part I of the CMIS specification. The second XSD defines the message formats for each of the CMIS services; the messages often refer to the data types defined in the first XSD schema. The WSDL presents exactly the abstract services defined in the services section of Part I of the CMIS specification... For authentication: A CMIS SOAP binding MUST support WS-Security 1.1 and Username Token Profile 1.1. A CMIS SOAP binding SHALL comply with WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and Basic Security Profile 1.0. A CMIS SOAP binding SHALL comply with WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and Basic Security Profile 1.0...

  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Appendices: Open Issues, Informative Examples, and Important Decisions. Version 0.5. 17 pages. Copyright © EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation. Available in XPS format from the complete CMIS Version 0.5 download.

    Appendix A: 'Open Issues' lists the set of spec issues that were still under discussion/consideration at the time this version of the spec was published. Issues are categorized by the spec section to which they apply, and each issue includes a proposed timeframe for resolution. Appendix B provides informative examples of various elements of the CMIS specification. Appendix C: 'Important Decisions' summarizes the rationale for various important decisions made in designing the CMIS specification. This section is intended to inform both implementers and future specification authors about decisions made in creating CMIS version 1.0..."

Vendor Company Announcements for CMIS

Press releases have been issued by (at least) five of the seven vendors, including a joint announcement from EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. Excerpts are provided below.

EMC, IBM, Microsoft Joint Announcement

Announcement 2008-09-10: "EMC, IBM, and Microsoft Jointly Create First Web Services Interface Specification for Greater Interoperability of Enterprise Content Management Systems. Trio joined by Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP in development of the Content Management Interoperability Services Specification."

EMC Corp., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a jointly developed specification that uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. The companies intend to submit the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process.

The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multivendor, multirepository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to "talk" to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems.

Working together since late 2006, the three companies were joined in the creation of the CMIS draft specification by other leading software providers including: Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle and SAP. A final gathering of all seven companies was recently held to validate interoperability of the specification before submission to OASIS.

"Many companies today are struggling with how to unlock the full value of their data when they have multiple content management solutions dispersed throughout their organization. Currently, 'marrying' these into one integrated system — or migrating content between systems — costs the IT department a lot in time and money," said Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content & Digital Media Technologies at IDC. "Given the need for a common standard that will enable customers to access disparate repositories, today's announcement certainly seems like a very positive step in the right direction."

"For some time now the world of content management has been evolving from separate application platforms to an integral part of a company's information infrastructure," said Razmik Abnous, vice president and chief technology officer, Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC. "As content management rapidly becomes a key piece of a company's business process, there's a heightened need for interoperability between the vast and diverse sources that manage this content. Today's agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal."

"By working together to define the CMIS standard, IBM, Microsoft and EMC are clearly putting the needs of all customers first in this important technology area. We have worked hard to develop a standard that continues IBM's efforts to leverage the principles of SOA and Web 2.0 interfaces to benefit the industry as a whole," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management.

"The real winner in today's announcement is the customer," said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of the Office Business Platform, Office SharePoint Server Group at Microsoft. "Today's businesses are driven by information. When companies operate in silos, with information scattered throughout the enterprise, it becomes extremely difficult for customers to realize its full value. By working together, we believe we can enable customers to maximize the use of critical business assets."

Key to the new specification, EMC, IBM and Microsoft worked together to define an interface that does the following:

  • Is designed to work over existing repositories enabling customers to build and leverage applications against multiple repositories — unlocking content they already have

  • Decouples Web services and content from the content management repository, enabling customers to manage content independently

  • Provides common Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to dramatically simplify application development

  • Is development platform and language agnostic

  • Supports composite application development and mash-ups by the business or IT analyst

  • Grows the ISV and developer community

"We applaud EMC, IBM, and Microsoft for reaching this milestone and for choosing to take the next step and advance this important work through an open standards process," said Laurent Liscia, executive director of OASIS. "We look forward to furthering the evolution of CMIS from specification to standard and to promoting the broadest possible industry adoption through education and implementation efforts."

For more information, and to download a preview copy of the CMIS technical specification draft, please see the Web site of any of the contributing companies:

For information on participating in the CMIS standardization work at OASIS, contact member-services@oasis-open.org.

Alfresco Announcement

Announcement 2008-09-10: "Alfresco Provides First Draft CMIS Implementation via Alfresco Labs. Allows Companies to Gain Hands-On Experience with Proposed Content Management Standard."

Alfresco Software today announced the availability of the first Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft implementation. As a contributing member of the draft technical specification, Alfresco is able to offer a draft implementation of CMIS for developers who wish to explore the draft specification.

Just as the major database vendors standardized on SQL in the 1980's, today's leading ECM vendors have developed a draft specification with the goal of delivering and enabling interoperability across content repositories. The draft specification is backed by Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP.

Today most companies have multiple content management systems supporting individual applications resulting in islands of incompatible systems. Organizations are searching for a write-once, run-anywhere content application that will both run against, and integrate content from multiple content management systems into a Portal, CRM system or Office application.

The objective of the draft CMIS specification is to deliver a common, REST or Web Services, API that can be used to develop write-once, run-anywhere, next generation content and social applications. Following the announcement earlier today of the planned submission of the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), Alfresco has made available the following for preview:

  • Support for the CMIS REST and Web Services bindings allowing client applications to connect to, navigate, read, and create content against the Alfresco content repository

  • Support for the CMIS Query Language providing SQL-like querying of the repository including location, properties, and full-text

  • A CMIS Test Suite to allow compliance compatibility testing against any CMIS compliant REST Binding

In order to drive the ongoing development and discussion of the draft technical specification, Alfresco will shortly make available CMIS webinars and tutorials.

"CMIS will ultimately become the foundation for developing next generation content collaboration and social computing applications," said John Newton, Chairman and CTO, Alfresco Software. "Developers can start exploring CMIS today with the draft implementation available from Alfresco Labs. CMIS will enable anyone to develop content applications on open source Alfresco and deploy them on SharePoint, EMC, IBM, or OpenText."

Alfresco Labs' Draft CMIS Implementation can be downloaded at:

      http://tinyurl.com/downloadcmis

To participate in the discussion about CMIS visit the Alfresco CMIS Forum:

      http://tinyurl.com/cmisforums

Read John Newton's blog on CMIS:

      http://tinyurl.com/cmisblog

Open Text Announcement

Announcement 2008-09-10: "Open Text Pledges Support for New Content Management Interoperability Services Standard, Completes CMIS Prototype to Manage Content from SAP Applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services."

Open Text Corporation, a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), today announced that it is supporting the new Content Management Interoperability Services standard announced today [reference] by a group of leading ECM companies, which are collaborating on the development of the new standard. Open Text has worked with SAP AG to create a prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services.

CMIS is a new, open standard that will offer new ways for content applications to 'talk' to content repositories. With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organize information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface. Open Text is a member of the group of companies working to develop the standard.

According to the press release issued today, "The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to 'talk' to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems."

"CMIS will mean much greater flexibility, so that organizations and their users can gain more value from information, no matter where it's stored," said Richard Anstey, Vice President Technology and Product Strategy for ECM Suite at Open Text. "CMIS will open up the world of ECM for developers to write new types of content applications that are freed from the confines of different information repositories. We think this flexibility will help customers realize a true enterprise ECM strategy by giving them more powerful content application that extend across the enterprise. Ultimately, CMIS is the perfect vehicle to help decouple the user experience from the complexity of the underlying content repositories in an organization."

According to Anstey, the CMIS standard will allow Open Text to leverage its content services to deliver richer enterprise content mashup applications much faster. The CMIS prototype for SAP applications is an example of how the CMIS standard can be leveraged by Open Text Content Services to expose a CMIS interface to Open Text's own applications as well as third party applications such as those offered by SAP.

CMIS is being submitted today for acceptance as an OASIS standard (www.oasis-open.org/). OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.

CMIS Overview: Vendor Statements

IBM

Overview from IBM:

"Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) — Extending Business Content Services":

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard is a uniform means for applications to work with content repositories. The CMIS standard is an element of the IBM Business Content Services integrated approach to manage and control content created by shared workgroups across your organization. IBM participation in CMIS development drives better interoperability between ECM products regardless of vendor and helps provide clients with more choice and lower costs when it comes to basic ECM needs.

The CMIS standard opens new possibilities for business partners and systems integrators to easily and effectively integrate IBM ECM products. CMIS

  • Makes it easier to integrate IBM ECM products into existing installations of Microsoft SharePoint, SAP, and other participating vendors
  • Does not replace the extensive API capabilities of IBM ECM portfolio products

More than a year in development, the CMIS standard is supported by IBM, Microsoft, SAP, BEA/Oracle, EMC, OpenText and Alfresco..."

Microsoft

From the Microsoft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) document:

CMIS is designed around a services architecture based on SOAP, REST and Atom to simplify application development. The process of developing content centric applications that are repository independent or that are capable of working with the content from various repositories becomes a viable option as a result of the CMIS specification. Examples of the types of applications we believe customers and independent software vendors will create include content mash-ups, document and records management applications, electronic discovery, multi channel publishing solutions and end-user collaborative workspaces and portals... CMIS demonstrates Microsoft's enhanced support for industry standards and will allow developers and independent software vendors to better interact with existing ECM systems and invent new solutions for customers...

Many companies today deal with multiple content repositories from different vendors. Whether this is driven by discrete business unit requirements, application specific solutions or mergers and acquisitions, connecting and sharing information among heterogeneous repositories reduces business flexibility while adding complexity and cost. CMIS addresses these challenges by providing core content services for connecting heterogeneous repositories within a corporate intranet or over the public Internet...

Leveraging the CMIS specification, customers with multi-vendor ECM systems will be able to dramatically reduce the IT burden of creating and maintaining custom integration code, enabling disparate systems to communicate with each other. Critical Data that was previously scattered within the enterprise can now be leveraged to its full business potential..."

Alfresco

From John Newton (Alfresco) "Alfresco Releases First CMIS Implementation":

"EMC, IBM and Microsoft just announced a new content service interface along with Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. On this occasion, we are releasing our CMIS implementation of this specification as open source...

The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) promises to become the SQL for Content Management. There have been previous attempts to create a universal standard for ECM, but none of them (ODMA, DMA, JCR) got further than a few vendors supporting it. The difference now is that the largest vendors, IBM, Microsoft and EMC have been joined by Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP to not just endorse this specification, but actually create working versions of the protocol. There is real wood behind the arrow, not just a lot of talk...

We have been anticipating and planning for this day since Alfresco's creation at the beginning of 2005 and have been architecting the system to support both web services and a REST architecture. David Caruana, Alfresco's Chief Architect, has built our Web Scripts architecture to simplify the creation of CMIS-like services. Since CMIS is based upon the ATOM Publishing Protocol, it meant that we have a pre-existing standard to model how Web Scripts can be modeled and built. We were able to demonstrate interoperability of web scripts and our web services along with other CMIS implementations at the recent Plugfest in Redmond in August [2008].

As we release our latest recommended version of Alfresco Labs 3, you can now try CMIS for yourself. Included are both the REST and the SOAP implementations as a prototyping platform. In addition, we have the latest version of the new SURF platform that simplifies building Web 2.0 types of applications and will increasingly be used to create CMIS applications and components as well. To complete the package, we are also delivering the latest version of Alfresco Share, which we anticipate will become a popular application for accessing not just Alfresco content, but other content in the future..."

EMC

From the blog by Chuck Hollis (EMC), "CMIS: It's Not Just Another Standard (JAS)":

I suppose anyone who's working in the IT industry has become skeptical — even cynical — about new standards in the industry. So many are proposed, fewer make it to final ratification, fewer still get meaningfully adopted by a majority of vendors, and precious few ever end up delivering the customer value once envisioned...

Content is exploding everywhere in modern enterprises — files, emails, content management systems, document repositories, and so on. For many customers, it's the fastest growing category of information. It's also where most of the high-value stuff ends up: reports, presentations, internal and external communication; collectively: the intellectual property of the modern organization. Whether it's exploiting the value of this information, reducing the costs associated with managing it, or simply complying with various edicts regarding compliance and retention, and many people think it's the new battleground in information management...

Between EMC, Microsoft and IBM, you've got all the heavy hitters in the enterprise content management space. Sure, there are lots of other players in the marketplace, but if these three big vendors agree and implement this standard, you've gotta think that more than a few others will want to participate as well. And it's not just the biggies, either: Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle and SAP also helped validate that the standard would be useful and provide the interoperability that everyone's looking for. You wouldn't buy a database system today that couldn't easily import and export data, would you? Or an office automation application that couldn't do the same? Customers want their data to be portable and interchangeable...."

SAP

From the SAP web site:

"In late 2006 EMC, IBM, and Microsoft started developing a new standard called Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) which specifies a universal set of capabilities to be provided by an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system and a set of services for working with those capabilities. SAP has been providing feedback to the specification and conducted initial interoperability testing with prototype implementations.

On September 10, 2008 EMC, IBM, and Microsoft announced their intent to form a new Technical Committee (TC) at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and to submit the technical specification of CMIS for further standardization. As a member of the OASIS TC, SAP will continue to play an active role in the evolution of the CMIS standard...

The objective of the CMIS standard is to define a common content management web services interface that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories. These capabilities and interfaces will not match every existing content management system and may require some level of change to existing products, at least in terms of conforming existing interfaces to those defined here. However, it is an explicit goal that CMIS will not require major product changes or significant data model changes like other standards such as JSR 170 have required..."

CMIS Resources from the Vendor Companies

The CMIS vendor companies authoring the CMIS specification and testing software interoperability include:

References (in part):

CMIS TC Deliverables

Selected documents produced by members of the CMIS Technical Committee. See the Kavi document repository and the TC list archive for a complete and possibly more current reference list.

Principal URIs

General: News, Announcements, Industry Analysis, Blogs, Commentary

This section contains references to some eighty-some publications on CMIS, representing a variety of genres and perspectives.

  • [November 09, 2010] "Nuxeo Upgrades its Open Source OSGi-Based Content Management Infrastructure. Nuxeo Enterprise Platform 5.4 Adds Support for JBoss 5.1, JBoss EAP, CMIS 1.0." Nuxeo Company announcement.

    "Nuxeo has announced the latest release of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform, now with native support for JBoss AS 5.1, as well as JBoss EAP 5.0.1... The new 5.4 version of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (Nuxeo EP) and Nuxeo Document Management (Nuxeo DM) also features support for Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS and OpenJDK, advanced query and navigation mechanisms, and the new Admin Center (to install and manage new components easily), which is directly connected to Nuxeo Marketplace... The new version of the Nuxeo EP reinforces a commitment to open standards by offering a server based on Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS. This server provides native support of queries with CMISQL (including JOINs), and supports REST and SOAP bindings. Additionally, Nuxeo DM and EP 5.4 provide support for OpenJDK, an open source Java Development Kit, opening up further possibilities for developers and architects to build and embed content management applications...

    Highlights of Nuxeo EP and Nuxeo DM 5.4 include: (1) Nuxeo Marketplace: A complete solution catalog offering a range of free and paid plug-ins, templates and applications, opening the door to contributions from the Nuxeo developer community and Nuxeo Galaxy App Builder partners. (2) Nuxeo Admin Center: A personalized download and real-time patch notification dashboard for Nuxeo Connect subscribers, offering 1-click live integration of Marketplace packages, Nuxeo Studio projects, patches, and upgrades. (3) Content Views: A new service to manage, configure, and sort content listings, including documents, search results, and log entries. (4) Faceted Navigation: An advanced navigation mechanism that enables repository browsing with dynamic filtering on multiple facets (metadata). Navigation facets are fully configurable, and can be defined independently for a given document type. (5)Document Routing Service: Enables user-designed flows of documents and selection of stages (human or automated) among a shared library of steps. (6) CMIS 1.0 Support: Nuxeo EP includes the newly released Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS. Nuxeo EP is packaged as OSGi bundles containing components, services and extension points. These bundles form packaged distributions that meet common content management requirements such as Document Management, Digital Asset Management, and Case Management. Nuxeo EP is also available in developer distributions, designed to provide an ECM foundation for new content application creation, integration or embedding into existing enterprise applications. See also Nuxeo Marketplace as "the next logical progression for the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform, designed and built specifically as a foundation for content applications..."

  • [September 16, 2010] Apache Chemistry Project Releases OpenCMIS Version 0.1.0. By Gabriele Columbro. Apache Incubator Announcement.

    "The Apache Chemistry development team is pleased to announce the Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS 0.1.0 release under the Apache incubation. This is the first release for OpenCMIS -- a collection of Java libraries, frameworks and tools around the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) specification. The aim of OpenCMIS is to make CMIS simple for Java client and server developers. OpenCMIS provides APIs, SPIs and test tools allowing content server and application developers to focus on the ECM domain model, by incapsulating and hiding underlying protocol details. OpenCMIS provides two CMIS client APIs that are called Client API and Client Bindings API. The Client API is a high-level, object orientated API and suitable for most use cases. It sits on top of the Client Bindings API. The Client Bindings API reflects the CMIS domain model. It allows fine-grained control which makes the interfaces a bit clunky. The OpenCMIS Server Framework provides a server implementation of both CMIS bindings, AtomPub and Web Services, and maps them to Java interfaces. Requests and data from CMIS clients are converted and pushed to a repository connector. The connector translates the CMIS calls into native repository calls. It handles both CMIS bindings on the server side and maps them to a common set of Java interfaces. Repository vendors just need to implement those interfaces and don't need to worry about the protocol on the wire. There are two repository implementations based on the Server Framework that are handy test tools for client developers. The InMemory Test Repository stores all data in main memory. The FileShare Test Repository turns a branch of your file system into a CMIS repository. In order to make the implementation of CMIS clients and server even simpler OpenCMIS comes with a set of tests and tools. Currently available are the CMIS Browser and CMIS Swing Client. The CMIS Browser is a simple web based tool to browse CMIS enabled repositories that support the AtomPub binding. It sits between the web browser of the end-user and the CMIS repository. It applies stylesheets to the Atom entries and feeds that repository returns and creates HTML pages that enable the end-user to navigate through the repository. The OpenCMIS Swing Client is a simple desktop client built with Swing and the OpenCMIS Client API. The client is not part of the OpenCMIS code base, but a separate project..."

  • [September 15 2010] "Ephesoft Introduces CMIS Integration. Content Management Interoperability Services now integrated with Ephesoft Enterprise Edition." Company Announcement, Ephesoft.

    "The new CMIS specification (released in May, 2010) improves interoperability between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. With CMIS integration as part of Ephesoft, customers can now export the data coming thru Ephesoft and choose to archive the metadata or kick start document driven business processes quickly and accurately in their favorite ECM. Ephesoft's classification and extraction technology, combined with the CMIS Export plug-in, provides a cost effective solution to reduce labor costs and improve processes for companies using Intelligent Document Capture. Ephesoft CTO, Mr. Ike Kavas: 'CMIS integration adds the ultimate level of interoperability between document and image capture with Ephesoft and delivery of content to all compatible ECM vendor systems. CMIS is administered by OASIS which includes leading ECM vendors such as Alfresco, EMC's Documentum, IBM's Content Manager, Microsoft's Sharepoint, Open Text, Oracle and SAP.' Based on open source technology, Ephesoft offers intelligent document capture with scanning, automatic classification, data extraction, and document delivery. Because it is developed in JAVA, Ephesoft runs on either Windows or Linux, and the customer can choose from several ingestion methods. Ephesoft Community Edition is 100% Open Source and available for download at no charge... Ephesoft, Inc., based in Irvine, CA, has developed an intelligent document capture system designed to improve the automation of mailroom processes through classifying, sorting and separating incoming documents, and extracting pertinent information from these business documents for distribution and processing. Its mission is to have this technology available to enterprises of all sizes and help them process business documents efficiently and effectively in an integrated fashion..." See also "Document Management Roll-up: Ephesoft Supports CMIS" by David Roe in CMS Wire.

  • [July 27, 2010] "CMIS Browser Binding Proposal v0.1." Prepared for the CMIS Browser Binding Subcommittee by Gregory Melahn (IBM). Early draft ("v0.1"). Updated to Revision #1 based upon comments from Florian Müller. See the associated posting to the Subcommittee List and Kavi reference document, with source.

    "Overview: The CMIS Browser Binding is intended to make it simpler for browser-based applications to find, create, update and delete content stored in CMIS repositories. Also this binding is optimized for use in browser applications, it can also be useful as a simpler HTTP based binding in other application models. Protocol: HTTP shall be used as the protocol for service requests. HTTP GET shall be used for reading content and HTTP POST shall be used for creating, updating and deleting content. Data Representation: Browser applications are typically written in JavaScript and a popular lightweight data representation format amongst JavaScript developers is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as described in RFC 4627. So in this binding JSON shall be used to represent CMIS repositories, folders, documents, relationships and policies. Mapping Schema Elements to JSON: JSON only defines a few types, including Object, String, Number, Boolean, Null, and Arrays. Since not all the types used in the CMIS schema have direct JSON equivalents, some explanation of mapping is necessary. [As to] Referencing Resources by Path and by Id: Resources can be referenced using either the full path or by Id. When path is used, URI used to address the resource shall be relative to the rootFolderUri returned from the getRepositoryInfo service. In the case of Id, the request parameter id shall be used. For example, referencing an object by path: GET /cmis/repository/123/myFolder/myDocument and referencing an object by id: GET /cmis/repository/123?id=0192018282... [As to Paging] Since the number of objects returned from the navigation services can be huge, a mechanism for paging is provided. The optional input parameters defined on the navigation services, maxItems and skipCount, shall be represented as HTTP request parameters of the same name. A JSON object with the key cmis:pageinfo shall be present if the request parameter maxItems is present. This object shall have the following JSON key/value pairs: 'boolean' hasMoreItems and 'number' numItems..."

  • [July 19, 2010] "efs-cmis: A CMIS Based EFS Implementation." Reported by Dan Corneanu to Eclipse Labs on Googlecode. Eclipse Public License v1.0. EFS: The Eclipse File System (EFS) is an abstract file system API; it is used in the Eclipse platform to abstract away implementation details about what file system is used to store data in the workspace.

    Summary 2010-07-19: "efs-cmis (Plug-in ID = 'ro.savatech.eclipse.efs.cmis') is an "EFS implementation that communicates with a Content Repository via the CMIS Web Services APIs. It is very much work in progress and was tested with the Alfresco public server... It uses the metro stack for accessing the webservices. It provides a way of browsing/manipulating a Content Repository's content from inside Eclipse. Update site at Eclipse Labs. The plugin was tested with: Helios, Galileo, and JDK 6 update 20 on Windows 7/ XP Usage: (1) Install the plugin from the above update site; (2) Restart eclipse; (3) Create a new simple project; (4) Right click on the new project and select New -> New CMIS linked resource from the menu; (5) Give the new resource a name; (6) Set the URL, user name and password for the repository; (7) edit, create, delete as you would have done with a regular file system..."

  • [July 15, 2010] "Proposal for CMIS Profiles." By Florian Müller. Posting to the CMIS TC Discussion List. July 15, 2010.

    Excerpt: "I would like to propose a new feature for CMIS: CMIS Profiles. Rationale? Many applications that use a content management backend need more than just the core of CMIS. In order to work properly with a repository some of the optional CMIS features are actually prerequisites for these applications. Common examples are meta data query support, versioning support, relationship support, etc. Also the existence of domain specific type definitions could be a prerequisite. There might be also assumptions about behavior that cannot be expressed by CMIS means. For example, if a document is deleted all related documents are automatically deleted as well. Or, creating a folder of a certain type triggers the creation of a set default documents in this folder. Or, setting a specified property also changes property values on other objects. CMIS Profile Description: A CMIS profile is kind of a contract. If a repository claims to support a certain profile it guarantees that all the prerequisites are fulfilled and it behaves as described. A CMIS profile description is an informal description. However, there should be a recommended template in the CMIS specification. Each CMIS profile has a unique id. It is recommended to use a URI... The repository info will be extended by an id list of supported CMIS profiles for this repository. That should help applications picking a compatible repository. CMIS Profiles might be a way to define retentions, legal holds and a connection to Open Social without touching the core CMIS specification. CMIS Profiles could also have a shorter update cycle and don't (directly) depended on the update cycle of the CMIS specification..."

  • [July 15, 2010] "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit v1.0." Version 1.0. Software documentation, Release notes July 08, 2010. File: SharePoint2010AdministrationToolkit.exe. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) connector can be installed on any computer running Windows Server 2008 x64 or Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 and the Secure Store Service in SharePoint Server 2010.

    "The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit contains functionality to help administer and manage Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010... Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) connector for SharePoint Server 2010: The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) connector for SharePoint Server 2010 enables SharePoint users to interact with content stored in any repository that has implemented the CMIS standard, as well as making SharePoint 2010 content available to any application that has implemented the CMIS standard. The CMIS connector for SharePoint Server 2010 includes two features: (1) The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Consumer Web Part, which can be added to any SharePoint page. This Web Part displays and lets users interact with the contents of any CMIS repository. (2) The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Producer, which allows applications to interact with SharePoint lists and document libraries programmatically by means of the interfaces defined in the CMIS standard..." See also: (1) Bill Baer's blog; (2) Ryan Duguid's notice [bis] from MSDN Blog Postings.

  • [July 15, 2010] "What's This Thing Called CMIS? Part 3: Folders, Path, Versions." By Jens Hübel (Open Text). See also in the series: "Part 1: Overview, Domain Model and Bindings", and Part 2: Domain Model I, Repository, Types, and Properties.

    Folders: "Folders are well known concept. They are present even in the simplest form of file systems used all over the place. Access by path is also a well known pattern from the files system or from the World Wide Web. Versions are typically not available in a file system but are available in most document management systems. They are essential for any kind of collaborative editing and they can be used to preserve the history of a document... In CMIS every repository can have a folder hierarchy. Each folder has at least one parent folder. There is one special folder without a parent called the root folder. The navigation service in CMIS is used to navigate along the folder hierarchy. There are methods to get the parent(s) for an object or to enumerate the children. Each folder has a unique id. The id of the root folder is part of the repository info. The details how repository implementations implement folders vary. Therefore the CMIS specification has some optional. One of this options allows a document being contained in more than one folder. This feature is called multi-filing and is only available for documents. A document therefore can have multiple parents. Folders however always have exactly one parent (except the root folder). So each folder appears only once in the hierarchy. Another option is that a repository supports storing documents outside of the folder hierarchy so that it has no parent folder at all. This is called un-filing. Un-filing is often used for archiving scenarios where the main purpose of the repository is to preserve documents for a long time in a stable way. The repository provides an id and the id is stored in a leading application having control about the document and its context...

    Path Access: In many cases objects are identified by the path. The path points to the location in the folder hierarchy with a special character '/' separating the folders. A path is another mechanism to access a document in addition to the object id. Paths are used in the World Wide Web (URL) or from file systems. CMIS supports retrieving objects by their path (getObjectByPath in the ObjectService) or by their id (getObject). Be aware that a path to a document does not have to be unique. With multi-filing a document can be in multiple folders and so have more than one path. For this reason there is also no method like getPath() that returns the path to an object. Instead you have to use the getObjectParents() method that returns relativePathSegment strings...

    Versions: A document in CMIS can exist in multiple versions. Only documents can be versioned, other objects like folders, relationships, etc. can't be versioned. Not every document can be versioned. Whether versioning is supported or not is determined by the Document Type (versionable property). CMIS supports a simple linear versioning model. Versions can be major or minor. A version series indicates all versions that belong to one document. A version series has an id. The VersioningService is used to create and access versions. To create a new version in a version series the document needs to be checked out. After checking out you get a private working copy (PWC). A private working copy also has an id. Only one PWC can exist at any point in time for a version series. A PWC can be updated and edited by the user who owns the PWC. To create a new version the PWC has to be checked-in..."

  • [July 14, 2010] "July 2010 Incubator PMC/Board Report for Apache Chemistry." Prepared by members of the Apache Chemistry Project. Signed off by mentor: Nick Burch (Alfresco). Genre: The Apache Incubator must report to the ASF Board monthly. Each Incubator project reports for the first three months of its incubation, and then quarterly. Each month, roughly one third of the Incubator projects are reporting.

    July 2010 Apache Chemistry Project: "Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide an implementation of the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) specification in Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript (and possibly other languages). Chemistry entered incubation on April 30, 2009. Issues to address in the move towards graduation [when a podling becoming either a subproject under an already existing Apache project, or becomes a top level Apache project]: (1) First Java release — an attempt has been made but there were issues; (2) First non-Java release. Community development since the last report (April 2010 Board Report): PHP library added, with Richard McKnight as new committer. Project development since the last report: [a] OASIS CMIS 1.0 spec is final; [b] Code merge OpenCMIS / Chemistry completed, only one Java code base now; [c] Improvement / stabilization of the client API; [d] Improvement of the online documentation in the wiki; [e] Enhanced query integration in OpenCMIS; [f] First prototyping around the proposed browser binding (JSON protocol) in the sandbox; [g] More license documentations to make release candidate ASF compliant; [h] Preparations for a first release 0.1..."

  • [July 14, 2010] "Implementing CMIS." By Gert Leenders. Blog 'Productivity With Choice...'

    "Since the first of May the first version of the CMIS specification is finalized. This new standard is ideally suited for Repository-to-Repository (R2R) and Application-to-Repository (A2R) CMS integration. In this post I'll try to give you a brief overview of the possibilities and focus points concerning a CMIS integration... CMIS allows you to communicate with a CMIS compliant CMS via a standard way. The communication can be based on Webs Services or on Restful AtomPub. If you can freely choose between these two technologies I definitely would go for AtomPub because it's the most complete one... [The CMIS specification] states clearly that a compliant CMS not necessarily will support the whole spec. Especially if you have the idea to write an implementation which can handle multiple Content Management Systems at once, this could be a pitfall. Luckily CMIS has a query service available to retrieve the possibilities of a repository, and it is clear, you should first investigate the repository's possibilities (to figure out how much of the spec is implemented) before integrating a CMS via CMIS... Apache Chemistry provides open source implementations of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. There is an API available for different languages... The OpenCMIS Client contains two separate API's: the Client API and the Client Bindings API. The OpenCMIS Client Bindings API hides the CMIS AtomPub and Web Services bindings and provides an interface that is very similar to the CMIS domain model. The services, operations, parameters, and structures are named after the CMIS domain model and behave as described in the CMIS specification... Since there's almost no documentation available at this point I'll share some code with you. It's not too hard to get something working but most of the time to get there you have to dive in the source code of OpenCMIS from time to time. In contrast to the OpenCMIS documentation the CMIS spec however is very complete, and there are a lot of useful examples based on AtomPub..."

  • [July 13, 2010] CMIS Browser Binding Subcommittee Formed. As of 2010-07, the SC Chair was Gregory Melahn (IBM).

    Details: Members of the CMIS Technical Committee approved creation of the CMIS Browser Binding Subcommittee on June 14, 2010; see the CMIS TC Meeting Minutes 2010-06-14. See an early CMIS Browser Binding proposal [Draft v0.63, 29-May-2009] and references posted by Jens Hübel on July 13, 2010. Also: the June 2010 'chemistry-dev' discussion thread with postings from Florian Müller, Jens Hübel, Stephan Klevenz, Richard McKnight, Alexey Zavizionov, etc. With summary from David Choy on May 17, 2010: "The CMIS TC is starting a workgroup to produce an initial 'browser binding' proposal for CMIS version 1.1. Greg Melahn has kindly volunteered to be the workgroup coordinator. Workgroup participation is open to all TC members. Anyone interested in joining please let Greg know, or join the first workgroup call that Greg will arrange in the next few days. The workgroup will choose a suitable meeting time and frequency. Participation in workgroup meeting is optional. Its attendance does not affect a member's voting right in the TC.

    Prototype work on a CMIS Browser Binding has been done in the context of Apache Chemistry (OpenCMIS sandbox) using Javascript and JSON. An early (2009) draft of a CMIS Browser Bindings document [reference] was presented to the OASIS CMIS TC by David Nuescheler, motivated by the following considerations: "The SOAP and AtomPub bindings of CMIS do not lend themselves to a straight forward consumption by standard web browsers and require the creation and use of large java script libraries for the most basic use cases. Other use cases as simple as 'uploading a file' even cannot be covered at all with a browser talking to a CMIS repository. The lack of this ability even triggered conversations in the TC about having server-sided proxies that would again speak a proprietary protocol just to able to translate CMIS to a protocol that allows for mash-ups and browser interaction, which seems like very undesirable effect when specifying an HTTP based protocol for consumption by browser. Since mash-ups and simple browser interaction is a stated goal and use case of CMIS this document tries to close this gap by introducing a lightweight and easy to consume binding that makes CMIS effective in a standard Web environment..."

  • [July 06, 2010] "Proposal to Add Retention and Legal Hold Management Capabilities to CMIS." By Martin Hermes (SAP AG I SAP AG, Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16, 69190 Walldorf, Germany). Posting to the OASIS CMIS Discussion List. July 06, 2010.

    "For the next CMIS Version I'd like to propose an extension to the CMIS standard to support: (1) Retention management (acceptance, enforcement, and inquiry of retention time information) for documents, and (2) Legal hold management (managing information related to specific legal cases). Use Case Description: In an ERP system documents are often related to a business object (e.g., attachments to a sales order business object). For those documents it must be assured that they are kept as long as the leading business object is kept. The ERP system calculates the time until when the business object and its related data has to be stored. The business application must be able to push this retention information to the used CMIS backend. In case of a government investigation or audit which is related to a specific Business Object, it must be possible to protect all related data from being deleted (independent of the retention period). For this purpose it must be possible for a business application to set a legal hold on a CMIS object. As retention management and legal hold management will not be supported by all repositories, this feature should be added as an optional feature. A repository must be able to express if retention management and legal holds are supported. One option to implement this feature would be using the policies API which is already available in CMIS. Via predefined policies like RetentionPolicy or LegalHoldPolicy it would be possible to add this feature even without changing the API... Please let me know your thoughts about this proposal..."

  • [July 04, 2010] "Struts2CmisExplorer: A Web-Based CMIS Explorer." By Nicolas Raoul, +81-3-5771-1566. Struts2CmisExplorer is open source and available from the Googlecode web site struts2cmisexplorer.

    "Struts2CmisExplorer is a web-based CMIS explorer. It uses Struts2 for the user interface. If you have documents stored in your ECM repository and want to expose them (or some of them) to your clients/employees through an Intranet (or Internet/portal) web application, Struts2CmisExplorer is for you: open source, easy to integrate into an existing portal, and has no dependencies on a particular IoC framework — you can use your own. Struts2CmisExplorer works with any CMIS-compliant ECM (Enterprise Content Management) software. CMIS is a standard created by Alfresco, Day Software, EMC, FatWire, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP and others to access content repositories. Struts2CmisExplorer is open source, and uses GitHub, which makes forks/merges easy. So for instance if you want Struts2CmisExplorer to store its configuration in Spring, just fork and create a "spring-configuration" branch. Forks are very welcome, please use GitHub to fork...

    From the Blog: "Aegif was founded by ex-Documentum people when Alfresco appeared, and is the exclusive partner in Japan for Alfresco and Liferay. They contribute localizations and answer questions on the Alfresco Japanese forum, among other things... They realized a lot of companies needed a lighter alternative to the complex full-featured web clients that come with ECM products... Clients sometimes also need a simple interface to check 'their' documents (bills, reports, etc). Those interfaces are basically showing the files of a particular directory, embedded into the company's portal, and are usually developed for a particular ECM product. So they wanted such a reusable browser, that they could easily integrate into any client's portal, working with any ECM product. For the repository protocol, the choice was not hard. JCR could have worked, but CMIS is much more promising for document management. Even though most proprietary ECM products don't support it yet. For the UI library, they chose Struts2 because it is one of the most widespread enterprise web frameworks. Companies will not be afraid of using Struts2, and chances are they already use it. They brainstormed about the name, from monster names to totally abstract names, but finally settled for Struts2CmisExplorer, a plain and simple concatenation that leaves no ambiguity..." See also Spring Surf and OpenCMIS Integration.

  • [July 01, 2010] "WeWebU OpenWorkdesk is OpenSource." Sodtware Product announcement from WeWebU Software AG. July 01, 2010.

    "WeWebU Software AG, manufacturer of standard software for Enterprise Information Management (EIM), has released the Community Edition of its OpenWorkdesk. This suite of applications for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with an intuitive and user-friendly Web 2.0 front-end is now available as Open Source software and can be downloaded completely without charge from SourceForge. For many years, customers have grown to rely on the proven technology of WeWebU OpenWorkdesk's powerful functionality, usability, versatility, security, stability, and performance. The OpenWorkdesk Community Edition is now the Open Source standard for intuitive usability and management of CMIS-compliant ECM systems. It provides all the necessary features for eFile management and retrieval and hence enables users without ECM system experience to use state-of-the-art ECM functionalities with minimal training. The Community Edition allows customers and system integrators to build their own Composite Content Applications and vertical document solutions using WeWebU OpenWorkdesk. It also enables them to combine these solutions with minimal effort with their other existing applications. Furthermore, the regular availability of future Community Edition releases gives the customers the exclusive chance to try out all the latest new features at the earliest possible opportunity. Combining OpenWorkdesk with a CMIS-compliant ECM repository, such as Alfresco ECM, provides a powerful low-cost alternative solution, which delivers document management and retrieval in a professional way. Once customers are certain that OpenWorkdesk suits their needs and they would like to be able to run more advanced projects with higher demands on security and functionality, they should consider either subscribing to OpenWorkdesk Pro Edition or licensing OpenWorkdesk Enterprise Edition..." See also the WeWebU OpenWorkdesk 3.0.0.0 Community Edition Quickstart Guide: "Before you can deploy OpenWorkdesk Community Edition, verify that you have a correct setup to do so. OpenWorkdesk Community Edition will work with every Sun Java runtime environment (JRE) version 1.5.x or later. Furthermore, OpenWorkdesk Community Edition will run on every Apache Tomcat web server in version 5.5.x or later. OpenWorkdesk Community Edition should also run on other web servers like IBM WebSphere or Jboss, but we strongly recommend you to use an Apache Tomcat web server..."

  • [June 20, 2010] "CMIS Capability for Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)." By Andreas Muno. SAP Blog.

    "Organizations with compliance requirements in need of a procurement solution don't need to look any further than to SAP SRM to trace and track activities along the lifecycle of their procurements using tightly integrated SAP Records Management (now called SAP NetWeaver Folders Management) in the background. However, some organizations may already have their own records management or enterprise content management solution in place, and would like to hook it up to SRM (Supplier Relationship Management). SAP has already built a so-called enterprise content management interface, ECM-I, that is compliant with industry standard CMIS... Currently, CMIS is not available for SRM, it would have to be implemented, so customers have a choice what ECM application they integrate their favorite procurement solution with..." See also the blog article from Stephan Klevenz ('CMIS Makes It as Official OASIS Standard') "... SAP supports CMIS and has shown prototypes like an ECM Explorer implemented in Web Dynpro for ABAP connecting to several CMIS enabled ECM systems from OpenText, Alfresco and IBM. Furthermore SAP supports the Apache Chemistry project which is in incubation and implements CMIS libraries for Java and other technologies..."

  • [June 15, 2010] "CMIS 2.0, The Next Generation." By Laurence Hart. Word of Pie (Blog).

    [In part reflecting conversations within the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee about CMIS Candidate Discussion/Development Topics for Version 1.1/2.0 and related conversations]: "a list of business cases that we need support for in CMIS. Specific features may not be all listed, but I will be listing some to give an idea. The goal here is to stimulate everyone's collective mind and think about what we need in the next version. [Excerpted] as (1) Semantic Support: missing is the ability to query off of relationships; this will allow for more advanced relationship management (2) Records Management: now you can apply policies to a piece of content, but that policy could be a retention policy; (3) Support for Defined Data Models: satisfy the challenges of managing the same metadata model against different repository implementations of that model; (4) Create Content Types: create a new object type based upon a document or folder; (5) New Bindings: several ideas in the last year... WebDAV and JSON... (6) other examples: hierarchical metadata; tagging (set by combination of user and asset; Authority assigned to the tags; support for (queryable) aspects; ability to Query relationships in the 'Where' clause; with tagging, ability to query on tag strength... I'm sure that there are more, but I think those are the important ones. It helps the web-heads, the ECM types, and the solution providers..."

  • [June 14, 2010] "Spring Surf and OpenCMIS Integration. Part 2." By David Caruana. Alfresco CMIS Blog.

    "In March 2010 I wrote about a prototype integration between Spring Surf and OpenCMIS. Spring Surf provides a scriptable approach to building web applications. OpenCMIS provides a Java client library for accessing any CMIS compliant content repository. By combining the two, we create a development platform for building CMIS enabled web applications. Since that time, several enhancements have been made to the integration and also to the sample CMIS Browser web application. In the video below, new CMIS Browser features are demonstrated such as property, relationship and rendition views, query invocation and support for connecting to multiple repositories at once. These features are shown [here in YouTube clips] against both Alfresco and IBM repositories at the same time... The Spring Surf and OpenCMIS integration is a work in progress with code still under development. Feedback is welcome..."

  • [June 05, 2010] "Google Code Confluence CMIS Plugin Project." Code license: Apache License 2.0. With Discussion group for the Google Code Confluence CMIS Plugin project.

    "The Confluence CMIS Plugin is an extension for the widely spread collaboration tool Atlassian Confluence which allows editors to embed informations coming from other repositories supporting the CMIS specification. Wiki frameworks have introduced a very straight approach to knowledge-sharing; they (commonly) provide a very easy, simple and straight interface to fill contents in, avoiding complex templates and processes that can potentially discourage users to share their knowledge. On the other hand, contents filled in a Wiki are not structured (in most cases) and lack (sometimes) an enterprisey support for documents, assets and structured content. This specific use case needs an integrated solution which allow: (1) users to edit the contents in the way they prefer - typically the Wiki way; (2) assets/documents to be handled (not only stored) by ECM systems. The Confluence CMIS Plugin aims to fill this gap... The Confluence CMIS Plugin provides a way to configure one or more CMIS Repositories as sources using the Confluence Administration Console; by using a predefined set of macros (see below) an editor can embed any content coming from the CMIS Repository... The content rendered in the front page of a Confluence document is (a) Requested by a Confluence macro (i.e. {cmis-doclink:id=workspace://whatever/123456}), (b) Intercepted by the CMIS Plugin which invokes the OpenCMIS client API; (c) Rendered as Wiki Markup language to the Confluence rendering engine; (d) Delivered to the end user as HTML The 'confluence-cmis-plugin' project makes use of the standard Confluence Development Plugin Kit and OpenCMIS 0.1-SNAPSHOT. The plugin has been tested [as of 2010-07-19] with Confluence 3.2.1_01, Alfresco 3.3 Community — not tested with Enterprise yet, but expected to work the same of Community, and Maven 2.0.9+. You can run a quick test of the Plugin with the following simple commands; The first time it might take a while to download Maven dependencies, but the testing phase goes smooth and doesn't need any CMIS Server or Confluence to be up and running locally — test is performed using cmis.alfresco.com which adheres with the CMIS 1.0 specifications..."

  • [May 27, 2010] "Alfresco Delivers Next-Generation ECM Platform for Composite Content Applications. First CMIS-Supported Solution Extends Integration to IBM/Lotus, Microsoft Outlook, Google Docs, and Drupal." Staff, Alfresco Announcement.

    "While CMIS, cloud computing and market commoditization have left some vendors struggling to determine the future of enterprise content management (ECM), Alfresco Software today unveiled Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.3 as the platform for composite content applications that will redefine the way organizations approach ECM. As the first commercially-supported CMIS implementation offering integrations around IBM/Lotus social software, Microsoft Outlook, Google Docs and Drupal, Alfresco Enterprise 3.3 becomes the first content services platform to deliver the features, flexibility and affordability required across the enterprise... John Newton, Alfresco co-founder and CTO: 'Right now, we are facing a 'perfect storm' of issues and upheaval in the ECM industry — cloud computing and open source are a challenge for traditional ECM vendors, the CMIS standard will accelerate commoditization, and user demographics are changing the way people want to work. CIOs are realizing old monolithic ECM suites are failing to solve today's content management needs and are seeking alternative and flexible platforms to compliment their corporate architectures. The latest iteration of Alfresco Enterprise extends the platform's content services, enabling organizations to deploy composite content applications to support their business requirements'... The Alfresco Content Application Server in Enterprise 3.3 provides a robust and scalable platform that enables organizations to build and deploy future-proof content-rich composite applications... With the first and most complete supported implementation of the CMIS standard, Alfresco now enables companies to build new content-based applications while offering the security of the most open, flexible and future-proof content services platform..."

  • [May 20, 1010] "Future of Open Source CMS." By Stéphane Croisier (Product Strategy Manager, Jahia). Contentation Re-considered (Blog).

    "For a long time, CMS was a simple mixture of horizontal infrastructural libraries combined with vertical applications, without any clear segregation of duties. Most CMS solutions available today are still based on this monolithic approach. Recently, the industry-led (think JCR or CMIS) massive standardization and interoperability effort was coupled with a push to quickly prototype and launch rich content-enabled applications. This combination led to a greater separation of content platforms and content-enabled applications... The nice thing about composite content platforms (call them content application servers or content management platforms if you prefer), is that they act as dynamic content containers or as content runtimes, which can run content composite applications. The next generation of composite content applications will be even more dynamic. They will not only glue cold content together, but also will natively inherit from the merge of application servers and content stores, and create hot actionable content-driven applications... Four main trends are emerging: (1) A rapid growth of built-in content enrichment services available for any type of content assets; (2) Improved content interoperability services at the data level — OpenData, PortableData, CMIS, RDF; (3) The need to quickly assemble, reuse, mashup and reuse existing content assets within various content-enabled applications; (4) A tsunami of information, which needs to be correctly assessed and managed... Ideally, the next generation of composite content platforms should ensure a level of data openness and interoperability, aligned with the current CMIS, OpenData and other DataPortability trends. The goal of this new generation of Composite Content Platforms will be to offer a wide range of content enrichment services, while ensuring proper data interoperability and freedom. Ideally, composite content applications will become more standardized and portable, much as web applications became more standardized during the last decade. However, such a standardization process would take at least 5-10 years. Data Portability will therefore become one of the key purchase criteria..."

  • [May 20, 2010] Trends in Content Management: CMIS and its Value to Business." By Cheryl McKinnon (Chief Marketing Officer, Nuxeo). Presentation at Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2010, May 18-20, 2010

    "CMIS Statement of Purpose: Define a domain model that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management systems. Data Model, Abstract Capabilities, Set of Bindings, address problem of 'islands of incompatible systems' making it difficult for organizations and application developers to integrate content across and among systems. Use Cases for CMIS 1.0: Collaborative Content Applications, Portals Leveraging Content Management Repositories, Mashups, Content Repository Search. Secondary Use Cases: Content-centric Workflow and BPM, Archival Applications, Compound and Virtual Documents, Electronic and Legal Discovery. [Supports] Federated Repositories: Ability to use and consume content across multiple repositories; Appears to end user as one cohesive system; Ability to build single UI to access content in across; multiple repositories — entirely different ECM products..."

  • [May 19, 2010] "O3Spaces Workplace 3.2: Enabling a New Breed of Document Solutions." Staff, O3Spaces Announcement.

    "O3Spaces is pleased to present Workplace 3.2, the latest release of its successful document management and collaboration product. Besides the new functionality, Workplace 3.2 focuses on connectivity, extendability, document processing and workflow. O3Spaces Workplace 3.2 incorporates extensions of existing features such as Template-management for Microsoft Office and new Rules logic to provide for example automated document conversion. Workplace 3.2 now supports the CMIS interoperability standard, again extending its standards based connectivity. A prominent new end user feature is the Document preview functionalityin the 'Spaces' web browser environment. A broad range of document types can now be viewed and navigated without the need to download... The latest O3Spaces Workplace release, version 3.2, is available in two commercial editions. The Express Edition is an out-of-the-box document management solution for departments, workgroups and SMB's. The Enterprise Edition is the extensible content management platform, intended for customers looking to refine their document management environment and streamline their document-centric business processes. Both editions are available as traditional 'on-premises' installations and through the O3Spaces On-Demand service (SAAS)..."

  • [May 17, 2010] "Alfresco's Interpretation of CMIS Renditions." By David Caruana. CMIS Blog.

    "A relatively unknown capability of CMIS 1.0 is Renditions. In the content management world, the term 'renditions' typically means a facility to generate and retrieve alternative representations of content or a document. CMIS formalizes only the retrieval of such alternative representations. Although this may seem limiting, it does standardize common use cases such as the preview of reduced fidelity representations (e.g., a thumbnail), the discovery and retrieval of processed images and videos from a Digital Asset Management system, and the publishing of web compliant content from a Web Content Management system. Alfresco has provided Renditions support since its inception, although it wasn't until the recently released v3.3 that we actually called them Renditions. More on that later. In fact, anyone who has used Alfresco Share has used the Rendition capabilities of Alfresco. It powers the Thumbnail and Web Preview features of the Document Library... Alfresco v3.3 also implements the CMIS 1.0 specification including support for CMIS Renditions. This means that all Renditions generated by Alfresco are accessible through the CMIS bindings in a standardized way... Alfresco v3.3 introduces a new Rendition service that combines the best of the existing Thumbnail and Transformation services with the existing WCM forms rendering capability, providing a consistent way to generate renditions from any content in the Alfresco repository. Of course, extensions may be plugged into the Rendition service to create any kind of rendition. Used in conjunction with Alfresco Rules, the rendition service provides the basis for many types of content management application including DAM and WCM... Renditions were introduced into CMIS v1.0 quite late into its development where other features were postponed, but as you can see, the standardization of this capability allows for all kinds of use cases, in particular where a system requires integration with a DAM or WCM repository..."

  • [May 16, 2010] "What's This Thing Called CMIS?" Part 2. By Jens Hübel (Open Text). Jens' Blog.

    "If you want to use CMIS you always the first object you have to deal with is a repository. A repository is the topmost object in CMIS and can be seen as a data store. One CMIS implementation can maintain multiple repositories. Different repositories can contain different kind of data, or they can contain data stored in different physical locations. Different repositories may also have different capabilities (for example because they are optimized for a specific need). They even can be a virtual entity unifying different physical repositories under one umbrella. All this is up to the vendor and CMIS implementer, the standard makes no assumption about where one repository differs from another. But each CMIS implementation must have at least one repository (identified by a repository id). Repositories are accessed in CMIS using the RepositoryService. A client always needs a URL to access a CMIS server. For the WS (web service) binding you need to get a URL for each CMIS (web) service. For Atom you only get one URL identifying the AtomPub service document. For AtomPub you can easily start just using a browser.... Documents are the main entity managed by CMIS. Each document has a type. Whether a document must be contained in a folder or not is implementation specific (unfiling support). In contrast to a folder a document can be contained in more than one folder. Again this is an optional feature (multi-filing support) of an implementation. Whether multi-filing or unfiling is supported can be determined from the capabilities in a getRepositoryInfo() call. The document type also indicates whether a document can exist in multiple versions (versionable property). Repositories behave differently in regards how content of an existing document can be changed. Some repositories also support more than one content stream per document. This can be used for more complex documents (e.g. different chapters), multiple scanned pages or other additional information like signatures, annotations, etc. This is currently not supported by CMIS, though there is one exception (rendition)..."

  • [May 12, 2010] "CMIS a Winner for Content Management Customers." Jim Ericson, Information Management Blog.

    "Not many people get excited watching tech standards bodies work. Let's face it, when software — especially big software — representatives get together to talk about interoperability, you can bet there's a tinge of distaste behind the smiling faces and pledges of cooperation... OASIS made CMIS official just last week, and the whole thing took about 18 months, which is greyhound speed for such an agreement. CMIS is a repository-to-repository protocol for content and document management systems. It allows a built in standard of exchange for documents a company or party might have in Documentum, and others in IBM FileNet, or Stellent or whatever. As a standard, it will end a lot of back-end IT work to build or buy EAI or connectors or write custom code to interconnect different proprietary repositories.... Alan Pelz-Sharpe of The Real Story Group [wrote] 'CMIS, without exaggerating, it is the most important document management standard there's ever been in as much as there's actually support from everybody from Microsoft to IBM to open source vendors like Alfresco'... Think of how CMIS can delay or offset decisions to consolidate disparate systems and query them without a huge development project. And, if at a future data you change your mind, it's not difficult to get your document and metadata back out via the protocol... And there's a chance CMIS could potentially help gap the chasm of integrating unstructured and structured databases, if only because a lot of unstructured data already sits in databases. CMIS should allow some interesting experimentation and outcomes for vendors, and vendors will also use the standard to hedge into their competitors' sweetspot. Of course it was public demand that sped the passage of CMIS, and users and buyers were preselecting CMIS in RFPs even before it became a formal standard. Pelz-Sharpe noted that buyers were telling vendors they'd better support this or they wouldn't get on the short list..."

  • [May 12, 2010] "CMIS is Officially 1.0." By Al Brown (IBM; CMIS TC Secretary and specification editor). Blog.

    "It has been a long road to CMIS. I remember starting this effort with EMC and Microsoft in a conference room in San Francisco. Over the course of four years, we have made amazing progress to get to where we are today. I'd like to look at numbers since they always tell an interesting story. Since kicking off CMIS at OASIS we have had three Face to Face meetings (thank you MSFT, Oracle, and Day), 636 issues (way above the 250ish I thought we would address as a TC; I definitely owe someone a beer), 100 members and 45 companies participating in the Technical Committee, 3801 email messages, countless meetings, a LinkedIn group with 125 members... In the end we have over 15 GA and soon to be GA implementations: Adobe CS5, Alfresco, Microsoft SharePoint, EMC, Nuxeo, EntropySoft, Zia iPhone App, ISIS Papyrus, WeWebU, among others..."

  • [May 11, 2010] "WeWebU Presents CMIS-based Open Source version of OpenWorkdesk. Staff, WeWebU Product Announcement.

    "WeWebU Software AG, maker of standard software for Enterprise Information Management, will present its Open Source version of OpenWorkdesk for the first time at IBM Information On Demand (IOD) EMEA in Rome. The new version based on CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) will be demonstrated from May 19-21, 2010... WeWebU OpenWorkdesk, a suite of applications for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with an intuitive Web 2.0 front-end, has been enhanced with a brand-new CMIS adapter. Comprehensive tests against the Open Source ECM platform Alfresco were as successful as the tests with the new CMIS interface of an IBM FileNet system... Dr. Rainer Pausch, Head of Products and Marketing at WeWebU Software AG: 'CMIS opens the floodgates for innovative content-centric applications. WeWebU is the first to offer a whole suite of them. Even for free. Starting this July, we will provide an Open Source Community Edition of OpenWorkdesk free of charge. It can be run on all CMIS-supporting ECM platforms and will provide all essential functions for efficient eFile management and retrieval..." See also the May 05, 2010 announcement: "Cooperation with OSBF and OSR Group: WeWebU Expands Open Source Network" — "Starting in July 2010 as one of the first companies worldwide, WeWebU Software AG will provide user-friendly Web applications for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) based on the new CMIS standard (Content Management Interoperability Services) as Open Source. That is why WeWebU, maker of standard software for Enterprise Information Management (EIM), now works together with the Open Source Research (OSR) Group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and has become a member of Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF)... WeWebU OpenWorkdesk facilitates work across the boundaries of different ECM systems with a consistent look and feel. Numerous adapters for IBM ECM/BPM systems and open Standards like CMIS and JCR ease to integrate ECM back ends of many producers. Thus, customers can use WeWebU OpenWorkdesk with a single ECM system as well as in a system-spanning manner...' [and] 'CMIS will Change the ECM World: WeWebU Takes an Active Part": "WeWebU is a member of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee that defines the new standard. Since many years, WeWebU's products have combined data and processes from a wide range of ECM platforms in one unified, process-oriented work environment (e.g. WeWebU OpenWorkdesk, WeWebU Zero-Install Office Integration). With CMIS they are interoperable with almost every ECM system and usable in a wide range of cross-repository scenarios..."

  • [May 11, 2010] "Another New CMIS Toy: Generis Google Gadgets." Staff, Generis Knowledge Management. Blog.

    "Generis announced the launch of our first of a set of Google Gadgets for CMIS [for delivery 26-May-2010]: Generis Gadgets. The initial one is a gadget that allows users to search across CMIS repositories, and from the single results list to view document properties and content. The next in the set will extend that with the ability to edit both content and properties. So now from a single little gadget on your desktop, you can search across all your enterprise content (assuming it is in CMIS-compliant repositories) — you truly don't have to know (or care) where the content is. This is the very essence of what CMIS was setting out to achieve. The first release comes in two packages. The Free Version (which will be available from the Google Desktop website) allows users to select a repository and search within that... The Premium Version [...] has a configuration that allows companies to define a list of all the available CMIS repositories, at which point the search that users run will be executed across all those repositories and return all results into a single list..."

  • [May 10, 2010] "Flatirons Solutions Announces New iPhone App for Leading Content Management Systems." Staff, Flatirons Solutions Corporation Announcement.

    "Flatirons Solutions Corporation today announced the availability of a new mobile device application that allows authorized users to securely access Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms to view assets and metadata, participate in workflows, and view rich media on their mobile device. The application, called iCMS, builds on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard, and supports the EMC Documentum solution as well as iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices. Flatirons Solutions plans to extend the iCMS application to support other CMIS-compliant content management platforms and mobile devices, including Android and the recently released Apple iPad. The lightweight iCMS architecture includes both client and JSON-based server side components, and can be extended to support a wide array of client-specific business needs. iCMS is ideally suited for organizations whose knowledge workers need mobile access to an ECM repository in order to make decisions, advance business processes and approve formally managed content. Flatirons Solutions Chief Technical Officer Eric Severson noted that the iCMS application is a good example of the leading edge work that Flatirons Solutions does to support the rapidly evolving needs of its clients: 'As knowledge workers come to rely on mobile devices as a means of accessing enterprise information, optimizing the delivery of content to these devices becomes a critical business requirement. iCMS demonstrates Flatirons' leadership in meeting these requirements'... The iPhone version of iCMS is now available at no cost at the Apple iTunes App Store..."

  • [May 08, 2010] "What's This Thing Called CMIS?" Part 1. By Jens Hübel (Open Text). Jens' Blog.

    "The CMIS standard is now official; many companies have announced supporting this initiative including all leading vendors of ECM systems... [Here's] an article that focuses on the technical aspects without digging too much into details of wire protocols or source code (we might use it here and there for clarification but this is not the focus). This first part is the start of a series of giving an overview about CMIS. Hopefully you get an idea at the end what you can do with CMIS and whether it makes sense for you to buy into it. Here an overview about the parts that are planned (subject to change): Part 1: Overview, domain model and bindings; Part 2: Domain model part 1, Types, Properties, Content, Document, Folders, Path; Part 3: Domain model part 2, Versions, Relationships, Query; Part 4: Domain model part 3, Renditions, Permissions, ACLs, Policies; Part 5: Extensibility and Protocol differences, Compatibility; Part 6: Summary, Future Enhancements and Outlook... ECM systems deal with processing and management of such kind of information. A relational database alone is often not sufficient to manage these kinds of data. ECM is about managing your content. CMIS tries to standardize storing, retrieving and finding content and therefore allows exchanging information between different ECM repositories. The nature of lacking structure implies that ECM repositories follow very different approaches how to achieve this goal. Often they are specialized on only a few aspects, scenarios or data types that they can handle efficiently. Many special features exist that just make sense in a specific area, resulting in a wide heterogeneity of systems. Trying to standardize something in such an environment is a challenge. You need to find the right balance: On one hand it should be possible for a standard to be fulfilled by as many systems as possible. On the other hand you want to cover as much functionality as possible so that the standard is useful in a wide range of business cases and scenarios. CMIS tries to focus on the common parts that exist in most of the available systems today..."

  • [May 06, 2010] "CMIS: An Important Standard for Buyers of ECM." By Alan Pelz-Sharpe (Principal, The Real Story Group). CMS Watch Blog.

    "CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) has been ratified as a standard by OASIS. What is it and what does it mean to buyers and users of ECM and Document Management technology? Well put simply, CMIS is the most important new standard in the ECM world in decades; it is critical for any enterprise scale RFP. In essence CMIS allows different document management systems to interoperate at the repository level. So for example if you have a legacy system or two, or have plans to sunset a previous document management investment, you may be able to utilize CMIS to help with the migration of documents or to simply allow the old system to remain running, with documents at least accessible via the new system. CMIS has the backing of most of the leading vendors in the space, and most have CMIS adapters available or in development. Any new system you buy should be CMIS compliant — or on a sure path to compliance. Remember that your new system will itself become a legacy system one day, and it may well be beneficial to link it to other repositories at a future date... CMIS is not a complete panacea. Nevertheless, it's a standard of more importance to enterprises than it is to vendors, who rather like the idea of locking you into their way of doing things. Hence my enthusiastic encouragement to you to include CMIS support as a requirement on any future ECM or Document Management RFP..."

  • [May 05, 2010] "Active Endpoints Welcomes the New CMIS Standard." By Alex Neihaus. VOSibilities ActiveVOS Blog.

    "OASIS has announced that the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) 1.0 has been approved. As true believers in the value of standards for customers, we believe that ECM and BPMS have a natural, but not overlapping, affinity in companies that are developing a new generation of process applications. Now, users can rely on standards to protect them from losing their business logic to a proprietary integration. In February 2010, we demonstrated how CMIS can be used to integrate ActiveVOS BPMS with Alfresco ECM to create processes that combine content, people and systems in an open, standards-compliant way. It's a very compelling demonstration of the value of CMIS. We are pleased that CMIS has been approved and look forward to a world in which business processes can simply and compatibly integrate sophisticated content management capabilities..."

  • [May 04, 2010] "OASIS Members Approve Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard. Adobe, Alfresco, ASG, Booz Allen Hamilton, Day Software, dotCMS, EMC, FatWire, fme AG, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, Liferay, Microsoft, Nuxeo, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Saperion, WeWebU, and Others Agree on Standard to Link Disparate Content Systems." OASIS Announcement.

    OASIS announced the approval of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) version 1.0, a new open standard that enables information to be shared across Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories from different vendors. Advanced via a collaboration of major ECM solution providers worldwide, CMIS is now an official OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Using Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces, CMIS dramatically reduces the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Companies no longer need to maintain custom code and one-off integrations in order to share information across their various ECM systems. CMIS also enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems. David Choy of EMC, chair of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee: 'CMIS makes it possible for business units to deploy systems independently and focus on application needs rather than on infrastructure considerations. With CMIS, integrating content between two or more repositories is faster, simpler and more cost-effective. This is how it should be.' [...] Mary Laplante, vice president and senior analyst for the Gilbane Group: 'CMIS has the potential to be a game-changing standard, not only through its promise to facilitate affordable content management, but also as an enabler of whole new classes of high-value, information-rich applications that have not been feasible to date. At the end of the day, companies simply need better approaches to integrating systems. Business agility increasingly separates the winners from the losers, and agility is perhaps the biggest single benefit that CMIS offers'. CMIS is offered for implementation on a royalty-free basis..."

  • [May 04, 2010] "CMIS has Arrived, Demo Anyone?" By Laurence Hart. Word of Pie (Blog).

    "CMIS is now an official standard! I'm pretty stoked about the whole thing. When I started this blog, after I got through my initial list of topics, it was the desire for a SOA-based standard for ECM that provided the desire. Now that my desire has been met, almost three years later, what will I do for inspiration? Simple, push for CMIS 2.0... John Newton wrote a blog post about his Irrational Exuberance on CMIS. It is a great post for anyone with doubts to read. I don't think his exuberance is irrational. While the future of CMIS is not carved in stone, I think the forward momentum is great. (1) Alfresco has a supported release for CMIS, their Community Edition 3.3. Support for the Enterprise Edition is planned for this month. (2) EMC has announced that their latest early release candidate is the actual release candidate. CMIS will be part of the core platform in their 6.7 release at the end of this year. (3) Microsoft announced that the CMIS Connector for SharePoint will ship as part of the SharePoint Administrator Toolkit by the end of June 2010. This will include using SharePoint as both a consumer and supplier of content. (4) Day Software has announced their release of CRX 2.1 with full CMIS support. Other official announcements are likely to follow quickly now that CMIS 1.0 is final..." See also "Eight Things You Need to Know About the CMIS Standard."

  • [May 03, 2010] "Overview of ICOM and CMIS Specifications." By Eric Chan (Chair, OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) TC). With reference document.

    This document presents notes from Eric S. Chan's overview of ICOM, for the CMIS TC Meeting of 2010-05-03, as posted to the CMIS TC Discussion List... "The ICOM TC's objective is to standardize the classes, attributes, and operations for a wide range of collaboration activities. It has a focus on standardizing the domain model which can be used in other standards. ICOM is concomitantly defined in UML and RDF, and thus is language neutral. ICOM TC members may form related TC's for protocol and language bindings for ICOM... The goals are to (1) fill the gaps and reduce fragmentation of collaboration tools; (2) enable common clients to interoperate with collaboration platforms from multiple vendors to support a broad range of collaboration activities; (3) enable integration of collaboration artifacts across repositories, platforms, protocols, or services; (4) enable relevance ranking, faceted search, and relational navigation via linked-data across sites; (5) enable contextual collaboration in Enterprise Business Applications... David Choy and several TC members have proposed a 'Browser Binding' as an important focus area for CMIS 2.0 and beyond. ICOM standards can lend the bindings of CMIS generic domain model to the collaboration domain model and to a domain specific API... ICOM defines the concept of Unified Message and Message Channels. A CRUD operation that creates a Unified Message with channel attributes in the outbox implicitly triggers a process to deliver the message through appropriate channels. A few verbs/operations are still essential, for example the check-in operation to create a new version of a document. Rich clients and intermittently connected mobile clients can emulate version management using the object model while the check-in operation is pending response from the server.

    How ICOM May Complement CMIS: ICOM can be a basis for CMIS object type definitions and property definitions to extend the CMIS domain model with the standardized object types for collaboration, social networking, and knowledge management. For example, we can define the Unified Message by extending the CMIS Document object type. This way the Unified Message is represented as a semi-structured model that enables queries by properties (sender, recipients, received time, message flags, etc.), facets, and relationships to augment the text-based search. CMIS and ICOM joint members can contribute the social network and knowledge management model to the ICOM TC, and then extend the CMIS generic model and infrastructure to support the new social network and knowledge management domain model. Some projects build collaboration platforms on content management platforms. For example, DERI (a major contributor to ICOM TC) also contributes to the Semantically-Interconnected Online Communities (SIOC) in Drupal). Content management and collaboration are naturally related. CMIS platform can provide management of ICOM domain model for collaboration and social networking, while collaboration platforms can expose their artifacts through CMIS domain model and API..."

  • [May 02, 2010] "Now CMIS is Approved: Let's Find the Financial Benefit." Staff, Generis Knowledge Management. Blog.

    "[...] however good a standard is, the uptake of the standard and therefore its longevity and usefulness has to translate to a [revenue gains]... Let's consider the three main interest groups in this: the ECM platform vendors, the third party tool vendors, and the end [user] customers. Each has very different drivers for adopting CMIS standards, and very different potential financial benefits. [ECM platform vendors] have to invest time and money to make their platforms CMIS-compliant, and the end result is that they lower the barriers to entry for competitors, and potentially make it easier for customers to switch to different platforms. So how do they justify this (admittedly inevitable and very positive) technological advance? The most common message is that CMIS is the ECM equivalent of SQL for databases... For end user customers, the benefit of CMIS is to reduce the IT cost and time associated with managing multi-vendor / multi-repository environments. Data migration project? Cancelled. User training? Everyone gets a new single interface training. And the users don't care where the data really resides... Third Party Tool Vendors, who develop tools on top of the various platforms: We get to do what CMIS says we should be able to do — develop once, and re-use. Immediately, our development costs go down, our potential sales markets expand, and we have an accelerated development path, where we don't need to spend time on the common functions, but can really focus on adding [functionality]..."

  • [April 30, 2010] "Irrational Exuberance on CMIS?" By John Newton (Alfresco Chairman and CTO). Blog.

    "I am an incurable optimist. I believe in the power of technology and that with software anything is possible. So it is understandable that on a panel on CMIS at AIIM the other week, Microsoft program manager Ethan Gur-esh described my vision of what might happen with CMIS as grandiose. If you are not familiar with CMIS, it is the Content Management Interoperability Services, which has just been ratified by the member companies of OASIS. It is in effect, an SQL for Content Management. In other words, a set of protocols, interfaces and query language definitions that allow a program to be written to any content management system. On the panel, I described how I believe CMIS can transform the ECM industry, allow for significant growth and spawn whole new companies and markets... The panel moderator, Mike Mahon, is from Zia Consulting who has created mobile applications for the iPhone and Android using CMIS. In short, all the major vendors are all behind CMIS and it will soon be possible for developers to build applications that can run on any repository. Also, the level of functionality in CMIS is quite rich even if it doesn't cover all the functionality of an ECM system. It's enough to build some seriously interesting applications. Are there any precedents for this level of standardization, interoperability and functionality? Many standards, such as various workflow, business process, web services and XML standards, have not been able to achieve these levels of compatibility... New solutions that integrate collaboration and social networking capabilities will also be content rich and need the functionality provided by CMIS. If you were to design an API for content applications in the Cloud, it would probably look a lot like the RESTful protocol of CMIS, so expect Cloud applications and content-oriented SaaS offerings to take advantage of CMIS. This could be the creation of companies the size of those client-server companies and the web-based companies that followed those. The standardization of platforms heralds the opening of markets that rely on those platforms. And platforms, once they are standardized tend to stick around for a long time and grow..."

  • [April 29, 2010] "CMIS Close to Becoming a Standard. EMC Adds Support." By Jerry Silver. Documentum Developer Blog.

    "It turns out that the current CMIS download on ECN Labs is already 1.0 compliant, so there won't be another release in May [2010]. Also, the ECN Labs downloads are for preview purposes only. As stated below, official product support for CMIS will be in the Documentum 6.7 release... The final specification for Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is expected to be ratified by the end of this month as OASIS participants finalize their votes this week. Days before the April 30 voting deadline, OASIS had already received the minimum 15% of votes to ratify CMIS as a standard. In a nutshell, CMIS defines a domain model and a set of bindings that can be used by applications that need to work with one or more content management repositories from different manufacturers. As a result, CMIS-based code will allow applications to access any compliant repository, making it easier to develop applications for the cloud and other multi-repository environments. This maximizes enterprise effectiveness by reducing application development costs and improving user access to content... EMC has been providing preview releases for each specification milestone. You can find the latest downloads at the CMIS ECN Labs site. The Labs site has a shorttwo-part video by Dr. David Choy, Chair of the OASIS CMIS TC and a member of EMC's CTO staff, introducing the technology behind CMIS... CMIS will be included in the 6.7 release of Documentum, which is scheduled for release at the end of the year. CMIS could do for content management what SQL did for relational databases... Vendors are hailing the standardization of CMIS as a success story. CMIS provides basic functionality for content management interoperability. It was designed to make it easy for partners and third-party developers to create applications based on the specification..."

  • [April 28, 2010] "Day Software ECM Platform CRX 2.1 With New Support for CMIS and JSR-283." Staff, Day Software Holding AG Announcement.

    "Day Software Holding AG, an enterprise software provider of Web 2.0 content management and content infrastructure software, has announced the release of CRX 2.1, Day's open, standards-based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform. Day's new CRX 2.1 release promotes rapid development, deployment and scalable hosting of composite content applications in either a public or private Cloud... CRX 2.1 adds support for both the JSR-283 and CMIS standards. JSR-283 support follows the December ratification of this successor standard to JSR-170, capping a multi-year effort led by CTO David Nuescheler in the Java Community Process (JCP) and Apache Jackrabbit project. Along with support for JCR 2.0, CRX 2.1 also adds support for the upcoming CMIS standard, which is scheduled for final voting and ratification 30-April-2010. CRX's support for CMIS follows nearly one year after Day's announcement of the Apache Chemistry project to provide a common, vendor-neutral reference implementation of the CMIS standard to promote development and adoption of the new standard. With major vendors like SAP and OpenText part of the Apache Chemistry project, CRX 2.1 provides standardized support for CMIS in addition to support for JCR. CRX 2.1 features also include: (1) Virtualization and IT Consolidation: Day extends CRX's virtual repository to extend a JSR-283 and CMIS interface to leading enterprise content management repositories, including Microsoft SharePoint. (2) Rapid Composite Content Application Development: CRX 2.1 introduces new tools for developer productivity. For web developers, CRX 2.1 introduces a new browser-based development environment, CRXDE Lite, that offers code-editing, packaging and deployment support for composite content applications, along with integration with leading source code management (SCM) systems... (3) Rapid Composite Content Application Development; (4) On-Demand Scalability with the Cloud: CRX 2.1 adds new support for elastic storage capability with native support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3; (5) Cloud-hosted PackageShare Service: In addition to its native Cloud support, with CRX 2.1 Day also introduces its first Cloud-hosted service, PackageShare. PackageShare is Day's online service for enabling CRX developers worldwide to package and share composite content applications, providing a global catalog of pre-built solutions and components..."

  • [April 28, 2010] "Vendors Team on CMIS Content-Sharing Specification." By Joab Jackson. From InfoWorld.

    "A cadre of enterprise content management (ECM) software vendors is close to finalizing a standard for sharing data across their systems. Next week, OASIS is expected to ratify the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), a set of bindings that would allow different content management systems to offer access to their content in a single, uniform fashion. CMIS is the effort of a number of ECM heavyweights, including IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and Alfresco... It is a standard much needed by both vendors and their enterprise customers, observers say... Ian Howells, the chief marketing officer at Alfresco: "Today, the hooks for fetching and changing data in systems such as EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint are different for each system. Each application programming interface is completely unique... As a result, developers building applications that pull data from ECMs face a lot of work, especially if their creations need to access multiple content management systems. For each system, the content is in a proprietary format, the metadata is in a proprietary form, and the API is proprietary. It's a nightmare... CMIS could simplify matters insofar as it offers a single set of bindings that a developer could write to, and not worry about the underlying CMS. The bindings are based on either the REST (Representational State Transfer) protocol or the Web services-based SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)... What remains to be seen is to what extent the ECM vendors support the CMIS standard in their products... Thus far the vendors that have participated in CMIS seem enthusiastic. They have held a number of plug-fests to demonstrate that front-end querying software can draw data from a variety of back-end repositories..."

  • [April 26, 2010] "8 Things You Need to Know About the CMIS Standard" By John Mancini and Laurence Hart. AIIM Digital Landfill Blog.

    "[John Mancini:] "CMIS made a big splash at 'AIIM On Demand'. My personal opinion is that CMIS (or the SQL-ization of content repositiories) will have an enormous impact on the consumerization of ECM, one of the points I focused on in my keynote. The CMIS demo at AIIM is available online. I asked Laurence Hart, one of the real smart guys in the ECM space and CMIS-guru, to put together an 8 things post on CMIS. Laurence is Director of Technology Solutions for Washington Consulting, Inc. and the author of the blog 'Word of Pie'... [Hart:] (1) CMIS is A Content Management Domain Model with Protocol Bindings. CMIS is not a new interface into your content repository. At its core, it is a Content Domain Model. It defines a way to abstract the structure of any content repository into a common framework. On top of that, two different protocol binding have been defined to allow applications to interact with the underlying domain model... (2) CMIS Simplifies Repository to Repository Communication. This is one of the first ways to use CMIS that people think of when they hear "Interoperability". In this scenario, two or more repositories talk directly to each other. This is an extremely powerful use case as it permit the easy publication of content from one repository to another or the move from an active repository to an archived or records repository... (3) CMIS Enables Application to Repository Communication. The second fundamental user case is Application to Repository. This scenario is a boon to application developers. Content Applications can now be written in a content repository independent manner, allowing developers to focus on the user experience and business problems and not with learning the API for every vendor. (4) CMIS Enables Federation. The third use case is Federation: this is a powerful capability that will allow users to work with multiple repositories from a single interface... (5) CMIS is Technology Neutral. There are no restrictions on the technology platform: the bindings can be accessed from .Net, Java, PHP, Flex, or any other number of technology platforms... (6) CMIS is Vendor Supported. (7) CMIS is Supported by the Open Source Community. The open source vendors have been working together on an implementation, Apache Chemistry, which will enable all JCR-compliant vendors to support CMIS... (8) CMIS is Just Getting Started. The final release of CMIS 1.0 is imminent. For CMIS to succeed from here, it is important to not rest on our laurels. While CMIS provides core functionality, there is more needed. Records Management, improved custom metadata model support, semantic capabilities, and new bindings (WebDAV and/or JSON?) are among the capabilities that need to be added to strengthen the CMIS standard..."

  • [April 23, 2010] "AIIM iECM Demonstrated Implementation of CMIS at info360. Industry Leaders Create Health Care Focused Federated Content Environment." AIIM Press Release.

    "AIIM, Alfresco, EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, Microsoft, and Nuxeo announced the development of a demonstration implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification at info360 (AIIM International Exposition and Conference) that took place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 20 through April 22, 2010... The demonstration shows the use of CMIS version 1.0 specification to access electronic health records in several Content Management repositories or systems in a common and unified manner to make finding and accessing health records easier regardless of the storage location. Three clinical cases demonstrate the ease with which electronic health records may be located across repositories. We demonstrate how a physician will be able to conduct a search across repositories related to their patient and how patients will be able to view the documents and images that comprise their electronic health record. The vendors participating in the demonstration include Alfresco, Box.net, EMC Corporation, eXo Platform UA, IBM Corporation, Microsoft, and Nuxeo. Each of the vendors is operating their specific content repository which has been populated with electronic health records... [With CMIS] organizations will no longer be forced to select only one content management repository solution to be able to access information throughout the organization. The content stored in content management repositories installed either as an enterprise solution or to solve a specific problem can now be accessed through the implementation of the CMIS interface..."

  • [April 21, 2010] "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Connector for SharePoint 2010 in Admin Toolkit." By Jean-Christophe Cimetiere [jccim]. Blog.

    "Today at the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo, Eric Swift, General Manager of SharePoint Marketing announced that Microsoft will be shipping the CMIS Connector for SharePoint as part of the SharePoint Administrator Toolkit by the end of June 2010. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification defines a means of accessing enterprise content management (ECM) repositories independent of their platform or language. CMIS is on its way right now to OASIS for advancement through its rigorous standards development process. Microsoft, along with IBM, EMC and several other content management vendors developed the specification in response to customer requests for interoperability between multiple document repositories. For further details on CMIS read the announcement of the CMIS Connector for SharePoint on the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog, by Ryan Duguid: [...] We see CMIS as a great solution to help our customers more effectively leverage content maintained in a heterogeneous environment but more importantly, we see the specification as a way to enable a whole new range of Composite Content Applications that can be build agnostic of the underlying repository... We are excited that our work on the specification alongside the other leading ECM vendors is coming to fruition and are looking forward to providing support for the standard in SharePoint 2010..."

  • [April 21, 2010] "CMIS Just Steps Sway from Being Officially Ratified." By Jed Cawthorne. Blog.

    "CMIS [as an official standard] is very important for the ECM industry, but actually from my perspective even more important from an ECM / content management end user perspective. Official ratification of the standard, all out support from the industry, and baking the interoperability features into as many products as possible are a very good thing. This will make it much more easy (and elegant) for SIs or internal IT departments to build systems which work exactly as the business requires, not as the vendor which meets 75% of the requirement wants them to. As you will know if you have read my blog before, the important part of ECM to me is the 'strategy' — not the vision of an ECMS as a monolithic, one size fits all solution to all your unstructured information management problems. Yet I have led procurements where ECM 'suites' from the big vendors have seemed a better solution than trying to fit together disparate pieces to build something from "best of breed" products. CMIS promises to provide the best both worlds, a middle ground where "plug and play" comes to content management, so lets keep our fingers crossed for the continued development by OASIS and all those who have put in such a great amount of effort so far..."

  • [April 19, 2010] "Apache Chemistry Meeting Wrap Up." By Florent Guillaume. Blog.

    "Last week a meeting took place in Munich between the main developers behind the two Java Chemistry projects: Chemistry and OpenCMIS. I can say that the meeting was a success and that the two codebases are now in the process of actively being merged... People from Open Text, SAP, Alfresco, and Nuxeo were present. There were lively discussions about many technical points, but following the Apache rules of conduct for such meetings all points were summarized each day to the mailing-list for larger visibility and input by the whole community.. The remaining work to do for this merge will be logged in the Apache JIRA issue tracker, again to provide visibility. Once the current code base is stabilized, which we hope will take no more than one or two weeks, we want to make a first 0.1-incubating release, in order for clients to be able to start using a fixed version of the library. I will be the release manager for the first release, which will likely be the most complex one for us as we learn the ins and outs of releasing an Apache project. 'Apache Chemistry' continues to be the global umbrella hosting CMIS-related projects at the Apache foundation. The particular Java sub-project providing a general-purpose library for the client and server side, that was the object of this merge, is named OpenCMIS in recognition of the origin of the majority of the code. Other sub-projects (e.g., a python library, a Javascript one, various other clients, etc.) will be encouraged to find their own name to have an easily remembered identity under Chemistry. The website will also soon be updated with more documentation about all the projects, including the new OpenCMIS... At the moment Apache Chemistry is still in the incubation phase, but given that the community around it is now well established we hope to start the process of becoming a fully fledged top level Apache project soon... Meanwhile the OASIS CMIS standard itself is now being voted upon by the voting members of OASIS..."

  • [April 19, 2010] "Alfresco Community 3.3 Offers New Content Services Platform for Developers. Latest Alfresco Community Download Includes CMIS 1.0, Google Docs, and IBM Lotus Integrations, Enhanced WCM and Collaboration." Staff, Alfresco Announcement.

    "Alfresco Software, leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM), has announced the immediate availability of Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 for download. This release includes a range of content services for developers, including integrations with IBM Lotus Social software and a preview of an upcoming Google Docs integration. With LGPL licensing and enhancements to document and web content management (WCM) functionality, Community 3.3 is also the first ECM tool to enable developers to deliver content-rich business applications leveraging CMIS 1.0 open source standards... Alfresco Community Edition is a free-to-download, free-to-use version developed on an open source stack that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac for the Alfresco Community... John Newton, CTO, Alfresco Software: 'From CMIS 1.0-compliance that will 'future proof' content application development, to LGPL licensing, Community 3.3 offers a range of new features and functionality that will continue to extend the free distribution and presence of Alfresco open source ECM. The enhanced content services in Alfresco Community 3.3 are designed to help organizations better manage web presence with tools designed to simplify the process of building content-rich web applications using CMIS'... Significant enhancements to Alfresco Community Edition 3.3 includes content services that provide core content management capabilities, in a free-to-distribute CMIS runtime: (1) CMIS 1.0 Compliance; (2) Inline Content Editing Services for in-context editing, allowing non-technical content authors to edit content directly from the web page; (3) Content Repurposing — automated content formatting functionality that allows developers to build solutions to easily repurpose content for the web; developers can use automated rules and existing FreeMarker and XSLT templates to format content for multiple delivery channels; (4) Repository Replication and Web Deployment, where developers can utilize the transfer service to build solutions that transfer content between Alfresco repositories, enabling them to maintain rich content structures and relationships between Alfresco environments..."

  • [April 06, 2010] "EntropySoft Supports CMIS, Kerberos, and Offers a New User Experience." Staff, EntopySoft Announcement.

    "EntropySoft, global leader for Content Management Interoperability, today released a new version of its Content Hub. The Content Hub can be connected to more than thirty-five (35) content repository types and offers a centralized access point to all documents, as well as crossrepositories features. For a simpler user-experience, and for the first time in the data-integration market, content transfers can be managed in a web interface, with no technical skills required. For better interoperability, the content hub is now CMIS-compatible and can work with the latest Web Services standards. For tighter security management, the content hub is fully compatible with Kerberos. A unique differentiator for EntropySoft's Content Hub is that its web interface can be used by everyone in a company to manage complex transfers with no technical skills... Therefore, it is now possible to have business units managing on their own the content transfers in the extended enterprise, including transfers to and from the cloud. This is also true for Records Management and archiving. Thanks to the help of content transfer bridges, permissions are replicated, metadata are automatically mapped and there is full-traceability for all transfer of documents. Additionally, EntropySoft customers will benefit from CMIS-compliance by all EntropySoft software. CMIS is the new Content Management Interoperability Standard backed by ECM software vendors. CMIS is planned to receive its final approval in April 2010, but already EntropySoft is complying with the new market standard. The 35+ read-write connectors that are at the heart of the Content Hub are also CMIS-compatible, effectively normalizing the access to the most popular content-centric applications. The Content Hub is also implementing Web Services Security, the flexible and featurerich extension to SOAP for applying security to Web services, as well as MTOM, a method of efficiently sending binary data to and from Web services..."

    See also EntopySoft Connectors: "All connectors are built with a common API and therefore can provide a normalized access to the various content repositories. One technology only is needed to access all repositories. The API is simple, intuitive and fully documented. For increased interoperability, different technologies can be used to work with the connectors: The EntropySoft Web Services, CMIS (Web Services and REST implementations), Java, java remote and .Net... The connectors can be used to read, write, update metadata, change permissions, lock / unlock documents, check in / check out etc. They implement the main features of the underlying applications... EntropySoft connectors also offer the ground-breaking Repository Changes feature. The connectors now have the ability to track changes to the repository and deliver a list of added, updated and deleted documents since the last request. This is a critical feature for any application that needs to be aware of the latest changes of content or permission in a content silo. Any change to a repository is automatically recorded and a list of changes can be retrieved dynamically..." Xref 2010-04: Nicolas Maquaire (EntropySoft, CEO): "We announced on April 02, 2010 that our 36 connectors for content-centric systems can be accessed using CMIS and this is also the case for our Content Hub (central access point for all repositories)..." Source: the embedded posting in the message of Al Brown to the CMIS TC Discussion list.

  • [April 01, 2010] "Chemistry and OpenCMIS Technical Comparison." By Florent Guillaume, Florian Mueller (et al.). Apache CMIS Report.

    "Apache Chemistry consists of two separate Java projects: Chemistry and OpenCMIS... Chemistry's goal is to provide general purposes libraries for interaction using Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) between a server and a client. Chemistry provides a high level object-oriented API so that an application developer can manipulate objects like documents or folders and can call simple methods on them without having to deal with details of a specific low-level communication transport. In addition to that, Chemistry also provides a SPI (Service Provider Interface) for backend developers, making it quite easy to use Chemistry to store documents in a project-specific manner. The SPI can also be used by the application developer if he wishes to get to the 'bare metal' of the CMIS protocol. Underlying this, Chemistry has implementations for the two CMIS transports, AtomPub and SOAP. OpenCMIS is a collection of Java libraries, frameworks and tools around the CMIS specification. The aim of OpenCMIS is make CMIS simple for Java client and server developers. It hides the binding details and provides APIs and SPIs on different abstraction levels. It also includes test tools for content repository developers and client application developers... The document 'Chemistry and OpenCMIS Technical Comparison' provides a (draft) technical comparison of the interfaces and classes present in both Chemistry and OpenCMIS... In Chemistry the session and the Connection are the same thing. The connection has different implementations depending on the way it's connected to an underlying protocol. The connection implements methods from the high-level API, and also gives access to the low-level SPI implementing different methods. In OpenCMIS the Session is a semi-generic context-like object (PersistentSessionImpl). Eventually, there will be two Session implementations. In the persistent model (almost) all changes are immediately passed to the repository. In the transient model all changes are cached until save() is called on the Session object. A Session can be 'connected' using parameters to instantiate internally a low-level provider (CmisProvider). The provider holds configuration parameters that enable it to create a low-level SPI through a CmisSpiFactory. Through the SPI you can get to the various SPI Service implementations... In Chemistry you get to a repository instance based on general repository parameters, and from it you can open connections with a username and password. The repository instance can be introspected (types, etc) without opening a session. In OpenCMIS, you get a session factory, from which you open a session, from which you can get to the repository info (types, etc.). All connection parameters are passed to the createSession() method, including repository URL..."

  • [March 30, 2010] "eZ Web Content Management platform gets even better with eZ Publish 4.3." By Staff, eZ Publish Announcement.

    "eZ Publish is an award-winning enterprise-grade Open Source Web Content Management platform that help businesses publish any type of information, anywhere by anyone. Powering more than 200 000 websites globally, eZ Publish is used for web publishing, media portals, intranets and e-commerce solutions... the reliability and quality of eZ Publish 4.3 has made significant strides beyond its predecessors. With eZ Publish 4.3, end users benefit from many enhancements and minor bug fixes as well as improved documentation, and testing, including an updated eZ Find with better multi-lingual handling, facets, performance enhancements, a new eZ Script Monitor extension for background script processing, updates to the eZ JS Core, eZ Multiupload, and eZ Survey modules, an improved LDAP login handler, and an updated iPhone Web Application. A number of promising new extensions are on track for eZ Premium service certification in eZ Publish 4.3, extending the platform in exciting new ways. The CMIS Client, a collaboration with eZ's business partner NXC, provides full CMIS 1.0 client support to eZ Publish, the CJW Newsletter is a new additional module for newsletter management, while XRow e-commerce provides a global e-commerce solution on top of eZ Publish. Many other extensions are forthcoming... See: NXC CMIS Client: " The NXC CMIS client extension makes it really easy to integrate eZ publish powered website with ECMS that support communication by CMIS standard. This extension, compatible with CMIS 1.0 is still under certification but fully ready for project implementation. It has been tested with a selection of ECM systems implementing CMIS such as Nuxeo, Alfresco and KnowledgeTree platforms. Extension supports browsing, downloading, uploading content by CMIS standard, also it contains additional class for ezpublish that makes it easier to integrate systems together. With this extension it is possible to create a links to documents that are stored on CMIS server side, and downloading it through ezpublish as proxy.

  • [March 25, 2010] "CMIS API Library for Python: Real World ECM Tools with Python and cmislib." By Jay Brown. From IBM developerWorks. [sic! 2009 ?? — see article part 1 in "A CMIS API Library for Python, Part 1: Introducing cmislib. A Client-Side Content Management Interoperability Services API", 25-March-2010, by Jeff Potts]

    "This article is Part 2 of a series on CMIS and Python, demonstrating how to build an xcopy-like data population and migration tool using the Python cmislib library. The tool not only xcopies local file systems to any CMIS repository but is also aware of JPG Exif data and preserves it during the copy if possible. The article has three main sections: (1) Python and CMIS — An introduction to and discussion of why Python is a natural fit when you write CMIS-related tools; (2) Code walkthrough — review of the code with an explanation of how it all fits together so you can easily extend it for other types of metadata and sources; (3) Running the tool — explore runtime aspects of using the tool as well as setting up the dependencies. If you are just interested in downloading the tool and using it without an explanation of why it came to be or how it works, then jump to the section Running the tool. When you build a CMIS client or tool, remember it is virtually impossible to build a truly compatible CMIS client if you only test with one repository. If you test with only one repository, you built a client for just that one repository, not a true CMIS client. Please always test with at least two compliant repositories to make sure that you are OASIS CMIS specification compliant. In keeping with these values, I tested this code with both IBM servers and the Alfresco public server. The easy part for me is that Jeff Potts has already done the work of making sure cmislib is compatible with the specification as opposed to just one repository, so after getting the prototype to work with the IBM CMIS server, my first attempt with the Alfresco server just worked... This example shows how easy it is to script complex operations against ECM repositories in a way that is compatible with all repositories that are CMIS compliant. Hopefully, this will inspire you to look into CMIS if you have not done so already, or if you have to consider using cmislib and Python next time you have some scriptable work to do on your CMIS ECM system..." See also Part 1.

  • [March 22, 2010] "Nuxeo EP ECM Platform and Nuxeo DM 5.3.1 Support Default CMIS Connector." By Stéfane Fermigier (Nuxeo). Software Announcement.

    Software developers at Nuxeo have announced the release of ECM platform software, Nuxeo EP, and the collaborative document management application built with the platform, Nuxeo DM. This is the first release to directly include CMIS support, whereas earlier support was provided by an add-on. Nuxeo DM now comes with the CMIS connector by default. This new release mainly brings improvements and bug fixes to the software. We have improved existing components and services, but very few new API have been added. This new version is fully backward compatible, hence upgrade is painless and requires no data migration or code change. Major improvements, in addition to the default CMIS connector: (1) OpenSocial support has been improved and upgraded with OpenSocial 0.9 and OAuth support, together with more compatibility testing; (2) The default user interface is more configurable thanks to generalized usage of Layouts and Nuxeo Studio; (3) The storage engine (VCS) has been improved and optimized for higher data volumes. Nuxeo has been working both on the specification effort on the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standard) standard, on a Java library under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation (Project Chemistry), and on the implementation of CMIS on top of a Nuxeo content application. Apache Chemistry 'is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like JavaScript) implementation of the upcoming CMIS specification, consisting of a high-level API for developers wanting to manipulate documents, a low-level SPI close to the CMIS protocol for developers wanting to implement a client or a server, and default implementations for all of the above. Chemistry aims to cover both the AtomPub and SOAP bindings defined by the CMIS specifications..."

  • [March 19, 2010] "Summary of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) 1.0." Posted March 12, 2010 to the CMIS TC Kavi repository by David Choy, Chair of the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee.

    Excerpt: "To mitigate the 'content silo' problem, CMIS specifies an interoperability interface for content management systems so that generic applications can be developed that can access any CMIS-compliant repository. CMIS is a protocol-layer interface. But it is not singularly defined for a specific network protocol. The CMIS specification contains a domain model and a set of protocol bindings. For Version 1.0, two protocol bindings are defined: a WSDL-based Web Services binding (service-oriented), and a RESTful Atom Publishing Protocol binding (resource-oriented). The CMIS interface is designed to be layered on top of existing content management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces... Four kinds of objects are defined: Document, Folder, Relationship, and Policy. They are defined as four separate root types in the type hierarchy, without imposing any affinity among them to allow maximum compliance. A repository may further define subtypes of these root types in support of specific applications. A subtype inherits property definitions from its supertype and may have additional property definitions of its own. Basic CRUD services (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) are provided for these objects and for content stream. In addition, a query service is provided for finding objects. (1) A Document object represents an information asset managed by the repository. It may have a content stream, can be versioned, and is queryable. A Document may be filed in zero or more Folders... (2) A Document object represents an information asset managed by the repository. It may have a content stream, can be versioned, and is queryable. A Document may be filed in zero or more Folders... (3) A Relationship object represents a binary, peer-to-peer, directional relationship between two other objects; services are provided for navigation through Relationships... (4) A Policy object represents an administrative policy that can be applied to, or removed from, another object. For the query service, CMIS supports a type-based, structured query language and leverages the SQL language. Specifically, a relational view is implicitly defined on top of the CMIS data model: a virtual table corresponding to each object type, and a table column corresponding to each property of an object type... CMIS provides an ACL-based access control capability, allowing an application to get, set, or alter simple access control rules for an object. An application may use or request either repository-specific permissions or CMIS-defined permissions... To validate the specification, a number of CMIS TC members have built prototypes, either to provide or to consume CMIS services, and tested interoperability between different vendor implementations..." [Source PDF and Word/.doc]

  • [March 05, 2010] ISIS Becomes OASIS Foundational Sponsor. By Max J. Pucher. From The ISIS Times Online Newsletter and Papyrus Platform Architecture: The Chief Architect's News Blog.

    "We are proud to announce that ISIS Papyrus has become a Foundational Sponsor of OASIS... With this move, ISIS Papyrus joins only a few but some of the most notable organizations in the global IT world. As a worldwide leader in its own right when it comes to consolidating inbound and outbound business communications and related processes in a single platform, ISIS Papyrus is certainly poised to contribute substantially to the efforts of the non-profit body. The technological edge developed by ISIS over the years and its ongoing commitment to promote benefits for business users match perfectly with the user-oriented approach and transparent governance advocated by OASIS. It will be of great interest how this cooperation brings about synergies for the broader IT community and for users and businesses around the world. Another focus will be on how open standards can provide for more flexibility in application development as the latter has been the major concern behind the unique Papyrus technology... I have been fairly outspoken when discussing the benefits of standards and made it clear that only those standards are relevant to us when they produce a substantial benefit to the business user. Otherwise they just cost money and hold back innovation. One of the reason to join was the creation of the OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. 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 archives, within one enterprise and between companies. We have announced the participation in the CMIS standards already over a year ago and have well advanced its implementation and testing. In this process we found that we should take a stronger shaping role in the [standard's] creation..."

  • [March 01, 2010] "Integrating a CMIS Repository with Zoho Using Gadgets in GateIn." By Jeremi Joslin and Team Developers, eXo Platform Enterprise WebOS Blog.

    "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a standard for improving interoperability between Enterprise Content Management systems. It's a new standard to make Document Management more interoperable. A year and half ago, I already wrote a web service in java to edit documents, stored in the JCR, with Zoho. As CMIS arrive, it seems a good idea to rewrite this one with this standard and using groovy. Last time, I used a greasemonkey script to integrate it in eXo ECM, but this time, I'm going to create a gadget for that. Thanks to GateIn Gadget Dashboard, I'll be able to follow multiple repository in one page and edit their files. Requirements for this project: (1) Browse the CMIS repository; (2) If file can be edited with Zoho, offer this possibility; (3) Work in the main browsers; (4) Work with all the public CMIS demo servers available... CMIS servers make available 2 types of API: SOAP and Atom. From javascript, it's easier to use the Atom API. But all the browsers don't handle namespaces the same way, so it makes it harder to parse response. We are going to use JQuery because it makes things easier than using the native javascript functions, but I guess it's possible to do the same with YUI, Dojo or other... Loading the feed from the gadget: now that we know how to parse the response of a CMIS server. We can start building our gadget. Most (all?) the CMIS repository are using BasicAuth as authentication/authorization mechanism, so if our CMIS server is on the same domain name we could directly send a request to it. But as we want to be able to integrate CMIS server from all over the internet, we need to use a proxy (remember the same origin policy of our browsers). I'd love to see CMIS repositories to use oAuth authorization mechanism, but as it's not the case for now, we need to write a simple proxy in Groovy and JAX-RS to do the authentication for us... Editing the files with Zoho: Now that we have successfully accessed to our files, we would like to edit them with Zoho editor (API documentation). We have to POST the file to their server, and they return the URL to edit it. When the user will save the document, the zoho server will do a POST on a callback URL (defined on our first POST) containing the document. We have now everything to be able to browse a CMIS repository and edit the files with Zoho. Have a look at the code of the final gadget and feel free to remix it. You can also view the demo on the xCMIS demo server...

  • [February 22, 2010] "Implementation Spotlight: cara3 from Generis." By Darrell Meyer. Ext Blog.

    "cara3 is a brand new and unique concept building on the CARA tradition — an ergonomically designed, fast, single web application to connect individually or simultaneously to any CMIS system. Currently released for Documentum, SharePoint and Alfresco, other CMIS repositories will follow during Spring 2010. It is designed to facilitate the creation, review, approval and management of documents. It leverages core repository functionality (using the new CMIS functions where available) while also providing performance enhancements and ergonomic improvements. In addition, cara3 provides new functionality to better manage controlled documents such as SOPs or complex documents such as reports or submissions through cara3 Structures and through reporting tools like the Task Manager and Status Manager. cara3 is underpinned by the Generis DocConfigurator product which allows rapid setup and configuration of the docbase to requirements... Consider the users who must access documents in several different repositories. That might mean being familiar with different user interfaces, different commands, different procedures for document workflow, etc. a potential nightmare for users whose only aim is to work on their documents. And what to do if you need to work on several documents simultaneously and your desktop cannot open the different repositories because of system demands? cara3 provides the solution to all these problems in one interface. Additionally, the interface is easily customized by the user via view management, widgets and dimensions built into the interface which are intuitive, easy to manipulate and stored as part of the users preferences to reappear at any computer they log in on. Reducing the end user's experience to a familiar interface based on personal preferences as to what is important for a particular user's experience focuses the user on the job at hand not the mechanics of the document management system. Ext also uniquely allowed us to build cara3 using the new CMIS functionality, which has only just been released by the major content management vendors. To build a complete application on a new framework in just a few weeks was something that would have been impossible without Ext. While cara3 meets the needs of end users, systems administrators also benefit from its functionalities. Created by thoughtful and knowledgeable architects cara3 meets all requirements of the most stringent validated systems. Leveraging areas where CMIS exists and providing functional placeholders for areas of future CMIS functionality administrators can tailor systems via configurable properties screens, automatic folders, languages, data dictionaries, dynamic no-maintenance security, audit and eSignature, Trash Can, search..." See the cara3 overview.

  • [February 16, 2010] "OpenCMIS Joins Apache Chemistry." By Florian Müller. Open Text Blog.

    "One of the details that distinguish CMIS from other standard efforts is that all major ECM vendors have built CMIS prototypes long before the specification has been ratified. It's not surprising that most of these prototypes are repository interfaces and simple GUI clients. But an enterprise-ready client library was missing. So Open Text, SAP, and Alfresco teamed up in summer 2009 to build an open source CMIS client library for Java. We called it OpenCMIS. All three companies brought their CMIS experiences to the table. Our first CMIS prototypes go back to spring 2008. We already had experimented with CMIS clients and knew how a client library should look like. And we could also contribute proven code fragments. Meanwhile the low-level client that implements the CMIS bindings has been tested against most of the public CMIS implementations and against some that are not publicly available... Today OpenCMIS is more than a client library. It also consists of a CMIS server framework and a set of tools. It was time for a bigger community. The OpenCMIS group proposed a contribution to Apache and has been invited to join Apache Chemistry. Finally, the OpenCMIS source code will be added to Apache Chemistry this week. We are really looking forward to this collaboration. Together we can extend and improve our code bases and foster the adoption of CMIS..."

  • [February 11, 2010] "eXo Platform Introduces xCMIS Open Source CMIS Implementation." By Alexey Zavizionov. Blog.

    "eXo Platform has introduced xCMIS, an open source implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Fully compliant with the latest CMIS 1.0 - CD06 specification, xCMIS supports eXo's standards-based Java content repository (JCR) and works with third-party CMIS clients as well as a new eXo CMIS client based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The xCMIS server is being released as open source code under the LGPL... eXo's new GWT-based CMIS client offers the flexibility of building both standalone web applications and Google gadgets. Applications or gadgets created with this framework can be loaded from a remote location or integrated into a portal such as GateIn, the portal runtime co-developed by eXo and JBoss. The eXo CMIS client comes bundled in the xCMIS download, and will be accessible as a remote gadget leveraging GWT client libraries... xCMIS supports all the features specified in the CMIS core definition as well as both REST AtomPub and Web Services (SOAP/WSDL) protocol bindings. In addition to architecture supposed to provide an ability to a plug any third party content repository thanks to Storage Provider Interface layer... Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform: 'eXo was founded on open standards, which remain core to our DNA. We started with the industry's first Java portlet container, one of the first open source Java content repositories, one of the first enterprise OpenSocial implementations and now one of the most complete CMIS implementations available. In line with this commitment to open standards, we're making xCMIS widely available as open source to ensure that any developer can have access to a first-class CMIS server with which to write their applications'... The xCMIS server is available as a community beta release today with a production-ready version planned when the final CMIS 1.0 spec is ratified. Commercial support for xCMIS will be included in the next enterprise version of the eXo Platform, version 3.0, which will be based on GateIn..." See also the press release.

  • [February 04, 2010] "Nuxeo Releases First CMIS-Enabled Digital Asset Management Application." By Staff. Nuxeo Announcement.

    Nuxeo, an Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, has announced general availability for its open source Digital Asset Management offering Nuxeo DAM. Nuxeo DAM is the latest application based on the Nuxeo open source ECM platform, Nuxeo EP. Nuxeo DAM addresses the complex and resource-intensive demands of managing the rich media assets that companies rely on. Designed to meet the creative and ever-changing needs of marketing and brand managers, as well as the custodians of digital artifacts in education, government, military and cultural institutions, Nuxeo's digital asset management software opens up new opportunities for the creators, users and consumers of rich media to take control of their critical image, video or audio content... Nuxeo DAM is said to be 'the first application of its kind to meet the currently available draft of the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Nuxeo, along with many other industry leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe Systems, is involved with CMIS. CMIS is a proposed standard for interoperability across multiple ECM and web content management systems that is expected to be approved this year. Nuxeo EP, as the underlying ECM platform offering from Nuxeo, includes a CMIS Server, based on the latest CMIS specification, ensuring that packaged applications such as Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo DM benefit from the interoperability enhancements... Nuxeo DAM 1.0 Feature highlights: (1) Asset Capture /Batch Import: Media file uploads with IPTC and EXIF metadata extraction; quickly upload batches of media assets; bulk tagging with metadata; (2) Annotations: Annotate pictures and office documents directly from the browser; (3) Intellectual Property and Rights Management: Manage attributions and expiration dates; administrators view rights to asset folders; (4) Renditions: Store multiple formats of a media file for different use cases; (5) Filter-based Navigation: Browse the asset repository using dynamic visual filters on metadata — by full text, content type, folder name, geographical coverage, etc. (6) Watermarking and Export of Media Files: Watermark images to ensure appropriate distribution and attribution; configure export formats; expose a unique URL for assets, to ease integration; (7) Security and Access Control: Control sharing and access to assets with Access Control Lists (ACLs) on folders; support complex authentication setups, user sources, user groups, etc. (8) Configurable Content Model: Quickly define and configure the right content model for assets — define metadata, controlled vocabularies, etc. (9) Fully Browser- and Web-based: Use of web standards and technologies to provide a rich fully browser-based user experience no plug-in/Flash required; (10) Deep Integration Across IT Ecosystem: Leveraging enterprise-class features from Nuxeo EP, Nuxeo DAM works with existing IT infrastructure applications — LDAP for user/group management, SSO for authentication, CMIS Server, etc..."

  • [February 03, 2010] "Ignore the Spec: CMIS 1.0 is for Web Content Management Too." By Will Ezell. dotCMS Blog.

    [Note: The author of this blog article is not alone in seeing WCM (Web Content Management) as a desirable application area for CMIS. The initial CMIS TC Charter, however, did assert that Web Content Management (WCM) is out of scope for initial TC deliverables, while noting that "the next versions [1.1, 2.0, etc] may address Web Content Management Applications.] Will writes: "... as of last December [2009], we at dotCMS have thrown our hat in the ring with the OASIS gang to see CMIS reach its 1.0 milestone [update]. And I have to say that we have been excited as the CMIS spec gains credibility. It is the standard the CM world has been waiting for. If interest and adoption continue at their current pace, the content-as-a-service idea of CMIS could change the landscape of all large scale web CM implementations... [but] the specification precludes the idea of serving compound documents (per Section 2.1 Data Model: 'transient entities (such as programming interface objects), administrative entities (such as user profiles), and extended concepts (such as compound or virtual document, work flow and business process, event and subscription) are not included'...

    [However] "content in CMIS does not need to be filed, or that folders in CMIS do not need to map to a one-to-many hierarchy. Folders in fact, are not Folders at all but can be seen and used as Collections or as Taxonomies. Things are starting to look better for CMIS WCM... The addition of the idea of Renditions, or alternate views, of the content stream are helpful, and mean you can retrieve an image from the primary content stream and its thumbnail as a 'Rendition', but the web world needs the ability to be able to retrieve multiple different possible content streams from a single content object. Case in point, maybe you have a Document type called 'Interviews' that has properties like Interviewer, Interviewee, Headshot (image), Transcript (html), audio (mp3), tags, etc. that should be lumped together in a single entity for searching/retrieval. You could fake it with Renditions (which are read only via CMIS), or store a single multipart file in the contentStream (which would be a nightmare for CMIS clients), but sometimes it would be much friendlier and content node like to have the option to keep it all the heavy assets together in a single node without having to dig through relationships to find them.... CMIS will be useful in WCM. Take a common use case for integration. Let's say a company has an eCommerce store that has a catalog, products, a shopping cart, etc. which works well transactionally but looks awful. The problem is that the marketing department actually wants to sell products, which involves giving the marketers more control of the templates, the supporting web assets, the reviews, videos, testimonials that surround and decorate the product pages. We are finding that the CMIS 1.0 support as implemented in dotCMS 1.9 goes a long way to solving these types of issues. With CMIS, an integrator can reach into the dotCMS content repository and pull back templates, videos, personalized content, etc.. and use them on external sites..."

  • [January 27, 2010] "A Semantic Backend for Content Management Systems." By G.B. Laleci, G. Aluc, A. Dogac, A. Sinaci, O. Kilic, F. Tuncer (Software Research and Development Ltd., Middle East Technical University (METU) Technoparc 06531 Ankara Turkiye; Email: asuman@srdc.metu.edu.tr. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 231527.

    "Abstract: The users of a content repository express the semantics they have in mind while defining the content items and their properties, and forming them into a particular hierarchy. However, this valuable semantics is not formally expressed, and hence cannot be used to discover meaningful relationships among the content items in an automated way. Although the need is apparent, there are several challenges in explicating this semantics in a fully automated way: first, it is difficult to distinguish between data and the metadata in the repository and secondly, not all the metadata defined, such as the file size or encoding type, contribute to the meaning. More importantly, for the developed solution to have practical value, it must address the constraints of the Content Management System (CMS) industry: CMS industry cannot change their repositories in production use and they need a generic solution not limited to a specific repository architecture. In this article, we address all these challenges through a set of tools developed which first semi-automatically explicate the content repository semantics to a knowledge-base and establish semantic bridges between this backend knowledge-base and the content repository. The repository content is dynamic; to be able to maintain the content repository semantics while new content is created, the changes in the repository semantics are reflected onto the knowledge-base through the semantic bridges. The tool set is complemented with a search engine that make use of the explicated semantics..."

  • [January 13, 2010] "Lotus Gets Open Source Infusion from Alfresco." By John Fontana. From Network World.

    "Alfresco announced that it would ship this spring [2010] software to integrate its content management software with the lineup of IBM Lotus software, notably Lotus Quickr... Alfresco executives said the REST architecture played a big role in the quick integration between the two platforms as did support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. IBM officials called it a match made in CMIS heaven... John Powell, president and CEO of Alfresco says the multi-tenancy capabilities of Alfresco also make it easier to move ECM capabilities to the cloud. IBM/Lotus next week plans to expand on the Lotus cloud strategy it began detailing at the 2009 edition of Lotusphere. Alfresco also supports a host of other standards to help join the two platforms, especially from a developers perspective, including APIs, protocols and services such as Java, PHP, CIFS, XForms, SOAP, and .net..." According to the Alfresco announcement: "Alfresco and IBM worked together to develop a seamless, fully featured integration between Alfresco ECM and IBM Lotus social software in record time due to the modern, open, REST-based architecture of Alfresco's ECM software and the forthcoming Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard... At Lotusphere (January 17-21, 2010), Alfresco Software is demonstrating the technical preview of Alfresco Content Services for IBM Lotus. The integration between Alfresco's open source enterprise content management (ECM) system and IBM Lotus social collaboration products extends to Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal..Alfresco ECM uses a flexible architecture to address organizations' content management requirements — Document Management, Records Management, Web Content Management, or Email Archiving — through one value-based solution..."

  • [January 10, 2010] "What CMIS Will Do for Content Integration." By Andrew Conry-Murray. From Intelligent Enterprise.

    "In a recent InformationWeek Analytics/Intelligent Enterprise Enterprise Content Management survey of 276 business IT professionals, 59% of respondents said their ECM systems could play an expanded role in the enterprise — if they could be more easily integrated with third-party applications. That's a big if. Linking apps to an ECM platform is expensive, involving extensive internal development or third-party specialists. That limits the number of apps (and users) that can take advantage of the content stored in these platforms. The Content Management Integration Services (CMIS) standard [is] a Web services specification that lets competing content management systems share information. Backed by leading vendors, including Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, CMIS aims to pry open proprietary ECM repositories, thus making the content stored in those repositories more available to applications and end users. For instance, enterprise search software or collaboration platforms could use the standard to find and share content. Web 2.0 mashups could be written to pull information from multiple repositories using CMIS as a common interface, instead of creating custom connections... For companies that have multiple ECM platforms deployed, CMIS can serve as a bridge between apps and those disparate repositories. And according to our survey, 58% of organizations have two to three ECM platforms in house already, while 18% have four or more... CMIS can spur development of new apps across a variety of verticals. For instance, as the healthcare industry digitizes patient records and stores as digital files more diagnostic information, such as MRI scans and X-rays, the need to manage that content and make it accessible to the right person at the right time becomes critical. This confluence of applications and content repositories goes a long way toward explaining the makeup of the major backers of CMIS..." [Note: the results of the survey are available in a free online report 'Silo to Gold Mine: What CMIS Can, and Can't, Do for ECM Integration'.]

  • [December 17, 2009] OpenCMIS Incubator for Content Mangement Interoperability Services (CMIS). Reported by Robin Cover in XML Daily Newslink.

    On December 09, 2009, a proposal was posted for a new incubator podling called OpenCMIS to support the OASIS Content Mangement Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. As proposed: "OpenCMIS will deliver a Java implementation of the OASIS CMIS specification. OpenCMIS provides a Java implementation of the OASIS CMIS specification. This includes a library to connect as a consumer to a CMIS repository, and a library to provide the CMIS protocol handlers on top of an existing repository. All the protocol bindings defined by the CMIS specification will be supported. The need for a common, open source CMIS library came up during the standardization work. David Caruana, David Ward, Florian Mueller, Jens Huebel, Paul Goetz, Martin Hermes, and Stephan Klevenz from Alfresco, Open Text and SAP started an initiative and design outline to found this project. Code and some design ideas from an existing open source project owned by Florian Mueller was an initial contribution to the project. The aim is to build an object oriented Java implementation of CMIS that encapsulates the CMIS protocol bindings, mainly to support clients using CMIS. Focus of this project it to support the needs of an enterprise environment, that is reliability, performance, and monitoring. With CMIS being adopted by various ECM vendors, there is a strong need for repositories and applications dealing with content to support CMIS. As CMIS defines a domain model and protocol bindings, Java developers would have to implement the protocol bindings from scratch. The CMIS specification focuses on the protocols, and is therefore service oriented. An object oriented API which encapsulates this services makes it easier for Java developers to use CMIS. In turn, easy adoption of CMIS by Java applications should help the standard becoming widely adopted. The initial goals are to (1) implement the CMIS 1.0 protocol binding for SOAP; (2) implement the CMIS 1.0 protocol binding for AtomPub; (3) implement a library with an object oriented API to encapsulate the CMIS protocol bindings for consumers..."

  • [December 16, 2009] "Content Management: Interoperability API Edges Towards Standardization." By Dick Weisinger (Formtek, Vice President and Chief Technologist). Formtek Blog.

    "It's been a little more than a year since Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification was announced in September, 2008. The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) has recently approved CMIS Version 1.0 as a Committee Draft. It is now in its final days of public review — which will wind up on December 22, 2009. The specification is then expected to be finalized in the first few months of 2010. The CMIS specification is backed by vendors including Alfresco, Adobe Systems, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. Alfresco has been ahead of the pack on promoting CMIS capabilities and is the first vendor with a complete working implementation of the CMIS spec as it is currently being reviewed. CMIS is included in the 3.2 release of Alfresco... John Newton, CTO, Alfresco Software: 'Anyone who doubted that CMIS would become a real standard should think again. CMIS will have a profound impact on the Content Management industry. Now everyone can try CMIS for themselves on Alfresco and contribute to the public review process...'."

  • [December 15, 2009 ] "Developing a Mozilla Firefox Plug-In for CMIS." By Gregory Melahn, Shun Zhang, Yan Chen, (et al.). From IBM developerWorks.

    "Thanks to Internet protocols, high-speed networks, low-cost devices, and the standardization of document formats, it's now simpler than ever to exchange information. We still struggle, though, to collaborate on business content. Why? Part of the answer is that business information continues to be stored in content silos, where software vendors independently decide many of the details about how the information is organized and accessed. A document stored in two different content management systems might be created by the same application and, indeed, might have the same number of bits... In the case of enterprise content management (ECM) systems, the sharing problem becomes particularly acute because the volume of information in ECM systems is extremely large and because the information itself is mission critical... Content management standards began to emerge in the late 1990s, and andards such as WebDAV and Java Content Repository (JCR) were important steps, but they still lacked many features needed to share enterprise content... This article presents an overview of a new proposed standard for accessing content, namely Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), and provides an example of how to use these services using Mozilla Firefox... The proposed CMIS standard is simple and defines an extensible domain model consisting of four base content types: document, folder, relationship, and policy. The two most important CMIS types are the folder and document types because that is where most of the content is... CMIS is an important proposed OASIS standard that makes it easier to share content from different vendors. Mozilla provides a framework for extending the browser, using plug-ins written in XUL and JavaScript. Using the service definitions from CMIS with the Mozilla plug-in framework allows you to develop new kinds of applications that extend the capabilities of the browser to work with content from a variety of sources. Although we hope the code example provided with the article is a useful way to get started, we encourage you to learn more about the proposed CMIS standard and the Mozilla plug-in framework, and to develop your own kinds of content applications..."

  • [December 08, 2009] "Reveille Software Announces Support for Proactive Monitoring of CMIS 1.0 Web Services. Upgraded Reveille Application Enables End-To-End Monitoring of ECM Web-Services Standard." Reveille Software announcement.

    "Reveille Software has upgraded Reveille EPM to proactively monitor the web services supported by the emerging Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) 1.0... Bob Estes, CEO of Reveille Software: 'We believe the CMIS initiative is especially important for organizations with disparate content management systems. With our enhancements to Reveille EPM and the CMIS standard, we now provide a consolidated dashboard view for all collaborative content management activity across the enterprise..'. [And] Brian DeWyer, CTO and VP Product Management of Reveille Software: 'When employing Web Services with SOA architectures, companies have significantly more flexibility, therefore it is increasingly important that organizations also have immediate visibility into the end-to-end user service levels of a compound ECM application. Reveille's agentless ability to monitor the CMIS 1.0 Web services enables companies using multiple ECM repositories to quickly and proactively monitor interfaces across ECM platforms that support the CMIS 1.0 standard. We can then provide a comprehensive view of both the native and CMIS 1.0-based interfaces for a number of the leading content management suppliers'... Reveille Software is the provider of the most widely-used experience and performance management (EPM) solution for enterprise content management (ECM) applications. Used by more than 375 companies, including GSK, T-Mobile and Chase, Reveille EPM helps companies ensure business-critical applications perform at peak efficiency and availability..."

  • [December 02, 2009] "Advanced CMIS." By Florent Guillaume. From Nuxeo Developers Blog.

    "The upcoming CMIS standard is approaching its final 1.0 version... time to present some of its most advanced features. As to basics, I mention quickly for completeness: CMIS stores folders, documents and relationship — collectively called objects; each object has a unique id; objects have 'object types' detailing the properties they're allowed to have; properties have the usual basic 'property types' — strings, numbers, dates, lists, etc; you can create, retrieve, update and delete objects — CRUD; documents may have an associated content stream — an attachment; you can search documents using a SQL-based language; clients talk to CMIS servers using AtomPub or SOAP.

    Below I will detail the more advanced features of CMIS. (1) Unfiling, Multi-filing: While most people are used to storing documents inside a navigation tree, where the intermediate tree nodes are folders, there are other ways to deal with content, which CMIS exposes through the concepts of 'unfiling' and 'multi-filing' — the term 'filing' expresses the idea that a document is stored in a place, much like in the real world. The first alternative way of storing a document is to not file it anywhere: the document is not held in a folder, it just exists: it is then said to be unfiled. This model of unfiled documents is quite common in the world of record management, where what is important is the 'record' (the content and metadata), and not a folder in which it may live. The record itself carries all the metadata you need to find it (dates, keywords, tags, etc.)... The second alternative way provided by CMIS to store a document is to allow it to live in several folders at the same time: this is called multi-filing... (2) Renditions: A rendition is an alternate way of viewing or representing a master document. For instance from an OpenDocument file you may derive a PDF rendition, a 100x140 pixels image rendition of the cover page, a Microsoft Word rendition, a rendition as a series of high-resolution images for each page, an HTML rendition, a pure text rendition... CMIS exposes a way to discover and retrieve renditions; documents and folders can both have renditions, each rendition being seen as an alternate content stream....

    (3) Versioning: In CMIS a document (if its type supports it) can be versioned, which means that 'old' versions are retained by the system. A version can be 'major' or not, but CMIS doesn't impose any semantics on this, it's just a useful abstraction. To create new versions, a model of checkin/checkout is used: after checkout from a version, a private working copy (PWC) is created, which can be modified and then checked back in, creating a new version... In the most complete scenario, the repository allows read and write access to all versions, including the PWC, and allows all versions and the PWC to be searched. The versions can also be filed independently in the same (or different) folders, several versions being then accessible at the same time. (4) Security through ACLs: a basic (and optional) set of permission management operations has been defined in CMIS, based on access control lists (ACLs). The ACL on a document is a list of basic assignment of permissions to users, defining what they can do on this document. CMIS defines three basic permissions: Read, Write, and All. It's up to each repository to define exactly the semantics of these permissions.. The CMIS repository exposes exactly what individual CMIS operations are allowed for each of these permissions. A repository can also define additional non-standard permissions... Optionally, a repository may allow a client to not only check but also change the ACL on a document... (5) Change Log: CMIS has an (optional) change log service that can be queried to discover the past operations that have been done in the repository after a specified date. The change log service returns a list of basic operations that have happened in the repository: object creation, modification or deletion, as well as security changes on an object..."

  • [December 03, 2009] "Three Reasons to List CMIS in Your Document Management RFP." By Alan Pelz-Sharpe. From TrendWatch Blog.

    "CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standard) was recently [released for public review] by OASIS and is already appearing in many RFPs. Nevertheless, it is a little misunderstood by some, and at times gets overlooked or misplaced. So here are three concise and valid reasons for putting CMIS on your list of RFP requirements... If you have legacy document repositories, add CMIS to your list of requirements. Almost every large organization has a collection of legacy DM and ECM repositories, closing those down or migrating content out of them can be tortuous and expensive, sometimes near impossible. Building a CMIS interface and federating access and viewing (no matter how basic) may well be your best option... If the system you buy has a CMIS API, then you go some way to avoiding vendor lock-in at a future point. CMIS in and off itself cannot resolve all the issues of vendor lock tricks, but its a great step in the right direction... When a vendor sees a specification or standard such as CMIS or XAM on an RFP they know you have done your homework, they know you are aware that committing to a vendors proprietary system can be difficult and costly, and that you intend to do what you can to mitigate against that risk..."

  • [December 01, 2009] dotCMS Web Content Management System (WCMS) Embraces CMIS Specification. By Staff, dotCMS. From the company announcement 'dotCMS First WCMS to Embrace CMIS Specification'.

    "dotCMS, a leading Java-based, open source WCMS software company, announced at the Sixth Annual Gilbane Conference in Boston that the upcoming release of dotCMS will implement the CMIS 1.0 draft specification. dotCMS is the first Web Content Management System (WCMS) to integrate the newly released specification into a web management product... The adoption of the CMIS 1.0 specification within the dotCMS product will roll out in phases: Version 1.9 (due to be released in Q1 2010) will include a draft implementation that will be finalized by release 2.0, scheduled for Q3, 2010... CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), was created to avoid the difficulties organizations face when integrating content with proprietary, partner and third party repositories. CMIS uses REST or web services as a unifying technology to allow content repositories to exchange information with any web services-enabled repository. Once adopted by the industry, it will allow any organization to reach across technological borders, retrieve permission-based content and information for use in multiple systems..."

  • [December 01, 2009] "KnowledgeTree Version 3.7 Document Management Software Supports CMIS. By Staff, KnowledgeTree.

    "KnowledgeTree, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software that is easily installed and used by business professionals, has announced the release of version 3.7 of its commercial edition, version 1.1 of its Microsoft Office Add-in, and an alpha release of KnowledgeTree Explorer CP (cross platform). KnowledgeTree 3.7, deployed on Zend Server, features improved performance; tests indicate KnowledgeTree runs up to 40 percent faster through the inclusion of Zend Optimizer. It also introduces the first iteration of KnowledgeTree's new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) interface, which is compliant with the 0.61 draft of the specification. By using Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols, CMIS enables greater interoperability among ECM systems. Daniel Chalef, KnowledgeTree CEO: 'KnowledgeTree continues to offer a simple, easy to use document management system that does not strain IT resources and is up and running in no time. By embracing open standards and other strategies that enable seamless integration with widely accepted platforms, such as Microsoft IIS and Kofax Capture, KnowledgeTree is answering the needs of the enterprise user'..." See also the KnowledgeTree CMIS Wiki.

  • [December 2009] "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). Addressing Contemporary Requirements for Content Integration." By Dale Waldt, Senior Analyst. December 2009. White Paper sponsored by members of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee, including Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Nuxeo. From Gilbane Beacon Guidance on Content Strategies, Technologies, and Practices, the Gilbane Group. 12 pages. Also available from Nuxeo.

    "The deployment of multiple content management (CM) systems within a single organization is no longer a business trend, but a business fact. AIIM reports in its 2009 industry overview that 'a single [enterprise content management] system concept' is in place at just 35% of the 568 companies surveyed this year. Mergers and acquisitions, a steady stream of new CM products, and the rapid evolution of innovative approaches like cloud computing virtually ensure that multiple disparate CM systems will define the enterprise IT landscape going forward. As a result, a growing number of companies are wrestling with the significant business challenges that result from the proliferation of CM systems within a single enterprise: content and data in isolated silos, operational inefficiencies due to disjointed processes, expensive and costly application development, and compromised business agility because of integration complexity... IT and business managers need new approaches to making disparate content management systems work together in useful ways. They can no longer afford to be saddled with significant integration challenges caused by systems with proprietary features and methods for communicating and accessing the data stored within. Historically these systems utilize specific connectors or adaptors to interoperate. The time and money required to integrate just two systems is burdensome. Cobbled-together integrations are not reusable or easily maintained. Worse, tremendous amounts of business value lie dormant simply because content assets cannot be leveraged across the enterprise... Gilbane believes that CMIS has the potential to be a game-changing standard, not only through its promise to facilitate affordable CM, but also as an enabler of whole new classes of high-value, information-rich applications that have not been possible to develop in the past. This paper describes the CMIS specification itself, the business and technical drivers behind its creation, and the benefits organizations can expect to see with its deployment..."

  • [November 30, 2009] EntropySoft CenterStage Connector Will Be CMIS-compliant. Staff, EntropySoft announcement: 'EntropySoft Releases the First EMC Documentum CenterStage Connector'.

    "[...] EntropySoft, a specialist in the Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) market, today announced the release of an EMC Documentum CenterStage connector... Through this CenterStage connector, the new EMC Documentum application for extended enterprise collaboration will be ready for search, e-discovery, Records Management connectivity and transfers. In its 35+ connectors portfolio, EntropySoft already had Documentum DFC, Documentum DFS and Documentum eRoom connectors. EntropySoft is now extending its EMC Documentum connectivity offer by making available a CenterStage connector. The EntropySoft CenterStage connector works with the DFS-based CenterStage Foundation Services. This is a simple way to access Documentum content via web-services. DFS access simplifies the network architecture and facilitates content accessibility for all platforms and appliances... EntropySoft's CenterStage connector allows the creation and modification of all the CenterStage collaborative objects such as spaces, folders, files, wiki, section, pages, blogs, blog entries, etc. The CenterStage connector also implements EntropySoft's latest content management intelligence feature: the track repository changes feature. The connector can track changes in the repository and deliver a list of added, updated and deleted documents. Changes to content, permissions and metadata are taken into account on an immediate basis. This is a vital feature for all companies who want to have an accurate view of their content and take real-time actions, such as immediate Records Management, to minimize critical data loss risk and optimize compliance with regulatory environments. Like all EntropySoft connectors, the CenterStage connector will be CMIS-compliant, therefore allowing easy standard connection to other applications..."

  • [November 23, 2009] "Getting Started with CMIS: Examples using Content Management Interoperability Services, Abdera, and Chemistry." By Jeff Potts (Optaros). November, 2009. 54 pages. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. [Cache/archive version]

    From the corresponding 'ecmarchitect.com' Blog article, 'New Tutorial: Getting Started with CMIS': "I've written a new tutorial on the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard called, 'Getting Started with CMIS'. The tutorial first takes you through an overview of the specification. Then, I do several examples. The examples start out using curl to make GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE calls against Alfresco to perform CRUD functions on folders, documents, and relationships in the repository. If you've been dabbling with CMIS and you've struggled to find examples, particularly of POSTs, here you go. I used Alfresco Community built from head, but yesterday, Alfresco pushed a new Community release that supports CMIS 1.0 Committee Draft 04 so you can download that, use the hosted Alfresco CMIS repository, or spin up an EC2 image... If you don't want to use Alfresco you should be able to use any CMIS repository that supports 1.0cd04. I tried some, but not all, of the command-line examples against the Apache Chemistry test server. Once you've felt both the joy and the pain of talking directly to the CMIS AtomPub Binding, I take you through some very short examples using JavaScript and Java. For Java I show Apache Abdera, Apache Chemistry, and the Apache Chemistry TCK. For the Chemistry TCK stuff, I'm using Alfresco's CMIS Maven Toolkit which Gabriele Columbro and Richard McKnight put together. That inspired me to do my examples with Maven as well (plus, it's practical — the Abdera and Chemistry clients have a lot of dependencies, and using Maven meant I didn't have to chase any of those down). So take a look at the tutorial, try out the examples with your favorite CMIS 1.0 repo, and let me know what you think..."

    "... there is definitely a lot of buzz around CMIS right now, client tools and integrations based on CMIS are springing up, and it appears to have broad support among major ECM players. Having a standard set of services for working with a content repository is an obvious benefit to software vendors who need to rely on content services, and would like to give their customers a choice in how those services are provided. But its usefulness also extends to enterprises, especially when there are a variety of presentation technologies and/or repositories involved... most companies Optaros deals with have more than one repository. In that case, projects are often forced into a user interface technology decision based on where their content assets reside and leveraging assets across multiple repositories from the same front-end can be tough because each repository has its own proprietary interface. CMIS helps with this problem by providing a common set of services that sit on top of your repositories. As long as your presentation tier can speak REST or SOAP, it can work with any of the CMIS-compliant repositories in your enterprise, regardless of the underlying implementation. Front-ends are no longer tied to back-ends. Any front-end can talk to any back-end, and they all do it in the same way. A Drupal developer using the Drupal CMIS module doesn't have to relearn anything when the repository is switched from Nuxeo to KnowledgeTree. Someone who knows how to make calls to a CMIS repository could jump from a Wicket project to a Django project and still be familiar with how to get the content out of Alfresco..."

  • [November 23, 2009] "Momentum Builds for Open Content Management Standard." By Chris Kanaracus. From The Industry Standard. Article also published in the NY Times.

    "A proposed standard meant to help content management systems communicate with each other has steady momentum, and an initial version could be finalized early next year. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) was first announced in September 2008. It outlines a standardized Web services interface for sharing content across multiple CMS (content management system) platforms. Organizations face difficulties when integrating information from various content repositories, because specialized connectors typically have been required for each system. Both customers and vendors stand to gain from CMIS. It should cut the amount of one-off integrations and custom development work end-users currently must do, and in addition, software vendors won't have to build and support a wide range of connectors, said 451 Group analyst Kathleen Reidy... The specification is supported by the content management industry's biggest players, including EMC, Adobe, Microsoft, Open Text, IBM and SAP. Open-source CMS vendor Alfresco is also a backer. The company said Monday [2009-11-23] it has included support in the 3.2 version of its platform for CMIS 1.0, which is now in a public review period scheduled to end Dec. 22. CMIS' inclusion in Alfresco 3.2 will enable users to get a hands-on look during the review period..."

  • [November 12, 2009] "Top Five Alfresco Roadmap Takeaways." By Jeff Potts (Optaros). Blog.

    "Now that the last of the Alfresco Fall meetups has concluded in the U.S., I thought I'd summarize my takeaways... CMIS: Clearly, CMIS is an important standard for Alfresco. In fact, one small worry I have is that Alfresco seems to need CMIS more than any of the other players behind the standard, but I digress. Alfresco wants to be the go-to CMIS repository and believes that CMIS will be the primary way front-ends interact with rich content repositories. They've been on top of things by including early (read 'unsupported') implementations of the draft CMIS specification in both the Community and Enterprise releases, but there a number of other CMIS-related items on the roadmap: (1) When the CMIS standard is out of public review, Alfresco will release a 'CMIS runtime'... my hunch is that Alfresco might be headed toward a Jackrabbit/Day CRX model where Alfresco's CMIS runtime would be like a freely-available reference CMIS repository... (2) Today deployments are either FSR (Alfresco-to-file system) or ASR (Alfresco AVM to Alfresco AVM)... Alfresco will soon add AVM-to-CMIS deployment. That means you can deploy from AVM to the DM repository.. (3) One drawback to using DM for WCM currently is that there is not a good deployment system to move your content out of DM. It's basically rsync or roll-your-own. On the roadmap is the ability to deploy from DM instead of AVM. This is one of the features the DM needs to get it functionally equivalent to what you get with the AVM..."

  • [November 09, 2009] "CMIS Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) — Public Review of Version 1.0 Begins." By Ethan Gur-esh. From Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog. "[In May 2006] my counterparts at IBM and EMC and I started discussing the need to form a group to create an open services standard for interacting with Enterprise Content Management systems (like SharePoint, IBM FileNet P8, EMC Documentum, etc.) in a uniform way. An earlier blog post explained the full rationale — but in short many customers and partners made it apparent that having to create one-off 'connectors' between each application (like eDiscovery applications, Portals or Business Process Management systems) and ECM system was making it hard for customers to use more than one ECM system and for partners to build great applications that could 'just work' with whatever systems a customer is using... To truly make it simple for ECM systems to interoperate, we need a standard set of ECM interoperability interfaces; that way, every system could support the same interfaces and they could work together without the need for special purpose 'connectors' between each pair of systems. And that's exactly what the CMIS standards effort attempts to define... And now, after working with many other vendors like Alfresco, Nuxeo, OpenText, Oracle, SAP, and others on the CMIS specification, forming a Technical Committee at OASIS to deliver that specification as a truly open standard, and having four 'plug-fest' events where we've tested actual (prototype) implementations of the spec together to make sure it would work in the real-world — I'm thrilled to announce that on October 23, 2009, Version 1.0 of the CMIS specification entered OASIS' public review process...

    At this point, pretty much every vendor in the ECM space is really motivated to start supporting CMIS in their respective products... For Microsoft's part, we announced at the ARMA 2009 Conference and at our own SharePoint Conference in the last two weeks that we are planning to deliver support for CMIS within SharePoint 2010... Until the CMIS 1.0 specification is final, we can't realistically commit to exact dates when our CMIS support would be ready. This means that our plans need to be flexible to balance the following needs: (1) Not rushing the finalization of the CMIS 1.0 specification in a way that would compromise its quality, and (2) Releasing CMIS support as soon as possible for SharePoint 2010 that meets the interoperability needs of our customers and partners..."

  • [October 30, 2009] "iPhone Native App, CMIS and the Cloud." By Dr. Q. Workshop Blog.

    "Mike Mahon (President) and Mike Muller (Director, Software Consulting) at Zia Consulting report on development of a native iPhone application Zia has developed that allows mobile access to an Alfresco document repository. This application runs against the most recent Alfresco releases; no additional software needs to be installed on the servers and no configuration of Alfresco is required. It is configured by default to run against an Alfresco instance running in the Cloud. All of the calls to Alfresco to authenticate and pull content are utilizing Alfresco's CMIS API... We are currently beta-testing the application, called Fresh Docs, for submission to Apple's app store. To be notified when it's available in the app store, or to participate in the beta test, contact iphone@ziaconsulting.com..."

  • [October 30, 2009] "OASIS Public Review: Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0." Cover Pages news story.

    "The OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee has approved a Committee Draft of the "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0" specification and released it for public review through December 22, 2009. Comments are invited from potential users, developers, and all others, for the sake of improving interoperability and quality of this OASIS technical work. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard "defines a domain model along with Web Services and Restful AtomPub bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. The CMIS interface is designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. It is not intended to prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those CM systems, nor to exhaustively expose all of the CM system's capabilities through the CMIS interfaces. Rather, it is intended to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by a CM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities." The CMIS specification of "23 September 2009" approved for public review as "Committee Draft 04" combines into one document the content from documents previously published as separate parts. Since standardization work began on CMIS in Q3 2008, numerous plug-fest and interoperability events have been held to test prototype implementations and discover (potential) ambiguities in the specification. Draft versions of the CMIS specification are now supported in commercial and open-source software from several companies. Formal work on standardization of CMIS began with the Technical Committee Call for Participation on October 6, 2008. The chartered work was based upon a contribution of draft version 0.5 from EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation. On September 10, 2008, the three companies announced "a jointly developed specification that uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors", with a declaration of intent to submit the CMIS specification to OASIS for advancement through its standards development process...

  • [October 19, 2009] "Maven and Chemistry Strike Back: A Maven Archetype as CMIS Labs and Toolkit." By Gabriele Columbro (Alfresco Software, Ltd). Blog - mindthegab.com.

    "CMIS is cool indeed, and especially working on it with Open Source tools like Alfresco, Maven and Chemistry can result in quite a bit of fun. I've been working quite a lot lately on producing some sample and training material for the coming Alfresco meetups [...] so I decided to mix and match the two things I can do best: (1) using my beloved Apache Maven; (b) using the Chemistry AtomPub TCK (former Alfresco CMIS TCK) that we contributed to ASF to provide high level access to the CMIS ReST API. This effort, which I'll probably heavily use in the next days Master Classes and training session, turned out to be quite productive as in a couple of days of work I was able to: (a) develop a Labs framework which wraps Chemistry TCK embedded CMISClient, (b) provide an easy CMIS 0.62 application(s) scaffolding platform using a Maven multimodule project, and (c) produce and release a Maven archetype which is now hosted our partner Sourcesense repositories ( big thanks go to this folks for being always supportive with their Maven maven infrastructure) and can be used as CMIS launchpad / labs / toolkit. Trying it is very easy, due to Maven archetypes power... All the nice tracing and validation features of the Chemistry TCK are exposed, once that you configured the POM to point to a proper CMIS 0.62 compliant server... It's a beginning but I believe it's a very nice tool to overcome the somehow still steep learning curve around CMIS, so I warmly suggest you start installing the VM and the archetype and play around with it, and even use it as start for your integration/contribution projects..." Note to the chemistry-dev list: "I've been working quite a lot around the Chemistry TCK and especially to integrate it (and its CMIS Client features) into starter packages for training and divulgation purposes. I've wrapped up my effort in a public Maven archetype which can be used as starter kit for people using CMIS and documented it here [1]. It's a very initial attempt but it's quite nice as it depends on the chemistry-atompub-tck, so I can keep it up to date with the standard by the means (almost) of a simple Maven dependency upgrade..."

  • [October 8, 2009] "Busting the ECM Myth." By Dmitri Tcherevik (Chief Technology Officer, FatWire Software). From Information Management Direct.

    "[...] CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) is currently undergoing active review and development in OASIS and is expected to be finalized within the next six to eight months. The number of companies participating in this work has grown dramatically. 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. There is a lot to like in this new standard... To users of a Web content management (WCM) product, it promises transparent access to content stored in the various content repositories directly from a Web site authoring tool. An image can be placed on a Web page and served to billions of Web site visitors regardless of where the original copy of this image was physically stored: in a document management system, in a collaboration workspace or in a digital asset management system. In this case, a WCM system acts as a CMIS client with transparent access to disparate content repositories deployed in the enterprise... A WCM can also be a CMIS server. This is particularly useful when content published on a Web site is syndicated to other Web properties and applications. With CMIS, every image, video and news story published on a Web site becomes a Web resource that can be found, retrieved, manipulated and reused in numerous gadgets and mashups. This is where the distributed nature of the standard and its native support for the popular Web protocols is especially helpful and valuable... I encourage every Web application developer and every enterprise architect to read up on CMIS and do some experimentation. An early draft of the standard has been posted for public review. There are a number of open source implementations available. Support for the standard is also likely to start popping up in a fair number of established enterprise content management products in the near future..."

  • [September 29, 2009] "CMIS One Year On: Soon In Public Review." By John Newton (Alfresco). Blog.

    "As of today, a majority of the [OASIS CMIS] technical committee has voted to put the CMIS specification to public review with zero no votes... This last year has seen the number of vendors participating increase substantially with plenty of beneficial results. We have had a few face to face meetings that have triggered some great collaboration in a very competitive industry. The number of eyes looking at the spec has increased, but so have the minds contributing new ideas and expertise... OASIS Committee members [are] building real life implementations of the specification at each stage to really test its implementability and completeness. As Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft once said, "I relish the fact that CMIS is retrospective." It can work with existing repositories, not be overly prescriptive, but still describe a powerful content application platform. Regular plug-fests ensured that the systems interoperated with each other. This alone distinguishes it from all other content management standardization initiatives - real life integration matching the current state of the specification. Dave Caruana's Java test harness, now in Chemistry, provided a tool for other vendors to test the completeness of their server implementations. Developers started creating new applications based upon the early specs, such as CMIS Spaces and CMIS Explorer, which tested its usability as a platform interface for content-centric applications. CMIS's initial focus on real-life use cases has so far paid off as the level of functionality seems to match new applications being built and existing applications integrate content management capability, such as Drupal, Joomla and Confluence have with Alfresco through CMIS... Today, unless some catastrophic event occurs, CMIS will go into public review..."

  • [September 16, 2009] "Information Management Trends 2: CMIS Will Save Us." By [Julian Carver]. Seradigm Blog.

    "One of the big challenges for Enterprise Content Management in the last few years has been the sharing of different content types. ECM covers records, documents, images, emails, forum posts, web content, lists, people profiles, and more recently blog posts, wiki pages, and microblogging. These content types were managed in different stores. Traditionally the only way to get single sourcing of content and sharing/reuse/blending of different content types across different stores was to buy all of the solution components from one vendor. Because of the fast moving nature of the industry even that was problematic as most of the players grew by acquisition, picking up different pieces of the ECM stack from companies they bought. Sometimes they weren't well integrated in, and compatibility/reuse was only at a very surface level, or was technically difficult to implement... Enter CMIS, The Content Management Interoperability Services standard... Once implemented it will be a way to break down the silos, and enable reuse of content amongst multiple systems. It should allow ECM applications, portals, and intranets to be built that aggregate content from a range of CMIS compliant repositories, and allow them to be mixed and mashed up in a 'loosely coupled' way. You'll be able to have best of breed repositories/content applications, from different vendors, and join them together seamlessly... CMIS will open up the enterprise content management space to more innovation, remixing, and creative solutions than we've ever seen before. Organisations will be able to choose best of breed components, and glue them together with relatively minimal effort. Solutions won't be restricted by vendor lock-in, but will be responsive to real business/user needs..."

  • [September 15, 2009] "Opening up in Self-Interest of Google, Microsoft." By Matt Asay. From CNET News.com.

    "[...] Look at Microsoft's support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a new content standard that promises to do for content management systems what SQL did for the database market. CMIS enables information portability between different content repositories... In other words, CMIS makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint into, say, Documentum. It also enables application vendors to write to the CMIS standard, rather than specifically to SharePoint... Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories? Because Microsoft knows that it can win. Take Microsoft's pre-CMIS partnership with Documentum. As CMS Watch anecdotally references, SharePoint is much easier to use than Documentum, making any partnership/integration between the two a largely one-way street from Documentum to SharePoint, just one reason that SharePoint has boomed, even as the economy has busted. This is only going to get better for Microsoft with CMIS interoperability. Interoperability favors the vendor whose products are easier to use. By opening up, Microsoft is opening its doors to more customers and, hence, more money..."

  • [September 11, 2009] "CMIS Standards Bode Well for Alfresco." By Brian Proffitt. Blog.

    "[...] Any company (entrenched or otherwise) in a given sector may choose to set up/adhere to an open standard because the marketplace is saturated with competition and customer growth would improve for all if standards were followed. It's a subtle difference, but it's the key reason behind the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard in the enterprise content management (ECM) sector... I spoke with Dr. Ian Howells, Chief Marketing Officer of Alfresco, at last week's Red Hat Summit. Howells outlined CMIS for me, and its potentially enormous impact on the ECM marketplace. Right now all of the big ECM players, SharePoint, Documentum, Vignette, tend to use document management and collaboration systems that follow their own set of formats and workflows. There's some interoperability work, but nothing really major. A big reason? While ECM has been around for quite some time, Howells estimates that only a small part of the potential customer base for any ECM solution has actually been tapped... With the CMIS in the public comment stage at OASIS, the potential for the ECM market to explode is near at hand. With companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft working on this standard, as well as the more specialized ECM vendors, there now exists an opportunity for former competitors to partner with each other and deliver joint solutions to new customers..."

  • [August 27, 2009] "The Content Management Interoperability Standard." By Jonathan Spira (CEO and Chief Analyst, Basex). Blog.

    "For organizations with multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments, the time and money that must be spent to integrate these systems with other enterprise tools, as well as to get disparate content management platforms to somehow talk to one another, is significant... The future of the knowledge workers' desktop lies in a fully-integrated Collaborative Business Environment, a workspace that supersedes the traditional desktop metaphor and provides the knowledge worker with access to all forms of information, resources (including people), tools, and applications that support his work. A true Collaborative Business Environment will include systems that integrate multiple content repositories and provide seamless access to enterprise content... CMIS, which is development platform and language agnostic, is designed to support existing content repositories, meaning that organizations will be able to unlock content they already have built up, in some cases, over several decades. It will decouple Web services and content from the repository itself, thereby allowing organizations to manage content independently. It also supports the development of composite applications and mash-ups...

  • [August 18, 2009] KnowledgeTree Incorporates OASIS CMIS Interface for ECM. Company Announcement.

    "KnowledgeTree, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software that is easily installed and used by business professionals, has announced the release of a developer snapshot of its product that includes an implementation of the draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. This snapshot is available for testing in the community. CMIS clients, such as CMIS Spaces, will work with the KnowledgeTree CMIS interface and allow users to access content as they would with any other CMIS interface implementation... In addition to the CMIS API, KnowledgeTree is also releasing a proof-of-concept CMIS client module to the Drupal web content management application community. This module demonstrates accessing content in the KnowledgeTree repository from the popular web content management server. Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree product manager: 'KnowledgeTree is being proactive in adopting and integrating CMIS into our product suite. This will allow users of ECM products to extend their software investments by gaining visibility into all enterprise document repositories that have a CMIS interface as well as realize benefits such as reduced vendor lock-in, improved interoperability between content management systems and a richer content management ecosystem'... Practice Director of ECM for Optaros, Jeff Potts: 'The KnowledgeTree CMIS module is built on the core CMIS module. I've worked directly with implementations of other standards for various purposes and have long been a fan of standardized communication mechanisms allowing people to share their data without having to worry about format conversions and communication issues. We're pleased to see other organizations like KnowledgeTree that are passionate about open standards'..." References: (1) KnowledgeTree CMIS Drupal Project ["The KnowledgeTree CMIS Drupal project integrates the KnowledgeTree document management system with Drupal and requires the CMIS API module as a base. The module allows users or administrators to execute CMIS API calls against a KnowledgeTree CMIS-compliant repository, browse the CMIS repository by navigating its hierarchy and provide repository information"]; (2) KnowledgeTree CMIS Wiki. See also "Interview: Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer and Partner Support Team Leader" (December 12, 2008).

  • [August 14, 2009] "Looking for a Balanced Enterprise Ecosystem: Flex, Alfresco and CMIS." By: iTechArt Group. Blog.

    "[...] In enterprise content management, Flex can come into play following the open source path, which is Alfresco — which is not an exclusive solution, as there are Flex UIs for Documentum, etc. The integration of Alfresco into LifeCycle ES has indicated that Flex developers can in fact benefit by getting their feet wet in ECM. The Flex/AIR/LCDS to Alfresco symbiosis seems to be a rather productive one, one that opens up opportunities for building rich apps backed by a CMS... Furthermore, over time content management gets curiouser and curiouser by moving towards a better, i.e., standardized, ECM world. CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services — an effort akin to the database standardization wave way back) 1.0 is round the corner, and, as an open-source player on the ECM market, Alfresco has been doing some heavy-lifting in implementing the current versions of the standard and thus forwarding it towards its first full-fledged self, with other big fish in the pond staying somewhat lukewarm as to their vision of how CMIS fits content management. And it's here where Alfresco tends to the exclusive end of the spectrum. Via synergies with Alfresco, the Flex folks can look for new spots to tap the framework into content management. One of the recent examples of such a spot is a repository browser — CMIS Explorer for Alfresco by Shane Johnson, which could ultimately become a user-friendly [desktop] app offering access to any CMIS-compliant CMS..."

  • [August 07, 2009] "CMIS: Hype oder nachhaltiger Industriestandard?" By Juerg Meier [WWW] (fme AG). ECM Blog.

    "Der Content Management Interoperability Services-Standard (CMIS) wurde letzten Herbst durch EMC Documentum, IBM und Microsoft in einer Version 0.5 als Entwurf dem Standardisierungsgremium OASIS übergeben. Daraufhin beteiligten sich auch andere Branchen-Schwergewichte wie Open Text, Alfresco, SAP und sogar die Apache Software Foundation an den Standardisierungsbemühungen. Heute sind praktisch alle bedeutenden ECM-Marktkräfte dort vertreten... So gesehen ist es wirklich ein großer Fortschritt, dass sich mit CMIS ein einheitlicher Syntax via WebServices resp. REST (HTTP) etabliert. Die zusätzlich nötige Softwareschicht sollte in einer Service-Orientierten Architektur untergebracht werden, genauso wie CMIS selbst natürlich auch. Und hier ergibt sich dann das wohl größte Sparpotential: wer heute bereits auf SOA-Basis Document-Repositories integriert, dürfte ein paar proprietäre Schnittstellen über Bord werfen können; für alle anderen wird die Integration solcher Systeme in Zukunft einfacher...

  • [August 03, 2009] "A Maven based CMIS Tck to contribute in Apache Chemistry." By Gabriele Columbro (EMEA Field Consultant, Alfresco Ltd Professional Services). Blog.

    "Lately I've been involved into refactoring the Alfresco CMIS Test Harness into an external TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) module to contribute to the Apache Chemistry. At the moment it's mostly focused on the AtomPub part (including an Apache Adbera extension), but being based on Apache Maven standards should be fairly easy to scale out to WebServices binding testing. This would be this first real contribution from Alfresco to the Chemistry project, where David Caruana and I have the luck of being involved as committers. At the moment the code for the will-be-called chemistry-atompub-tck is still hosted under the Alfresco contrib SVN space as still to be completed, but already offering quite some nice functionality to test the compatibility of your server to the CMIS 0.6.2 standard. The code (which was already in Alfresco and kept up to date to the CMIS standard directly by David) is now almost ready for contribution as it's completely decoupled from Alfresco and uses a standard Maven build process (Junit + Surefire) to run compatibility tests against an existing (and running) CMIS server... The idea at the base of this contribution is that this TCK can be used to test virtually any CMIS implementation and Maven profiles provide us a nice way to aggregate the full test fixture and publish the result in a nicely aggregated fashion. [We] would like all the other open source vendors involved in Chemistry to maintain their own profile which will serve as community reference for the CMIS readiness of a specific platform. Likewise we could setup 'sharepoint' or 'documentum' profiles to test existing public instances of those CMIS implementors, to always be up to date with their state of the art. This will, of course, make much more sense once integrated in Chemistry but it's already fully functional against the CMIS 0.6.2 standard and might be worth a try already..."

  • [June 16, 2009] "CMIS FileShare: Test Repository for CMIS Developers." By Nico Rehmann [WWW] (ARITHNEA). CMIS Blog.

    "A new test repository for CMIS developers is available in [CMIS FileShare] version 0.0.2... it uses the file system as its data store and therefore just provides limited functionality (no versioning, no relationships, no query, etc.). What is CMIS FileShare? CMIS FileShare is lightweight server implementation of the 'Content Management Interoperability Services' (CMIS) interface... CMIS FileShare is supposed to be a tool for CMIS client and server developers and it shouldn't be used in productive environments. CMIS FileShare exposes folders in a file system as repositories. It doesn't require more than a Servlet container such as Tomcat to run... Although the CMIS specification is still a draft, several groups and individuals are already building implementations. CMIS client developers need a CMIS server and CMIS server developers sometimes require a second opinion on how the specification draft should be interpreted. CMIS FileShare should serve these needs. It's not meant to be a reference but a working view on the specification draft. Since it doesn't require real repository software it has a small footprint and it can be set up almost everywhere in minutes. CMIS FileShare is also designed to follow changes in the specification draft. A new draft should be adoptable within a few days. This project might also become a platform for implementing new ideas. The strict separation of the repository part and the bindings implementations allows experimenting with new bindings and additional features that are not part of the specification... CMIS FileShare maps a branch of a file system one-to-one to CMIS. That makes it a simple to use test tool but restricts the feature set. It does not support custom types, queries, versions, relations, policies, ACLs and multifiling natively..."

  • [June 12, 2009] "Link Relations for Simple Version Navigation." Edited by Al Brown (IBM) and Julian F. Reschke (Greenbytes). IETF Network Working Group, Internet Draft. Intended status: Informational. Published: June 12, 2009, expires December 14, 2009. See the XML Version (Latest Version URI) and HTML Version (Latest Version URI). Contributors: "The content and concepts within are a product of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee (TC) at OASIS. All members of the TC have contributed." With initial comment to the OASIS CMIS TC List and IETF Atom Syntax List.

    Editor's note: "As part of the ongoing process of making the CMIS AtomPub protocol bindings a good citizen IETF-wise, we have been going through all the link relations it defines, and grouped them into CMIS-specific (these will use a CMIS-specific IRI and will not be registered), and general purpose. The second group consists of the hierarchy link relations we are already discussing (Nikunj's Internet-Draft), and link relations for navigating version histories, which Al Brown and myself have been working on. This draft [for "Link Relations for Simple Version Navigation"] is just a start; we have a few open issues (marked as such), examples are missing, and I'd also like to discuss the relationship with JCR and WebDAV in an appendix, but didn't have time to do so yet. Nevertheless it would be nice to get early feedback about whether this makes sense, and whether something important is missing to make it useful in non-CMIS scenarios. Feedback is appreciated..." From the Version -00 I-D: "This specification defines link relations that may be used on a resource that exists in a system that supports versioning to navigate among the different resources available, such as past versions... Several terms are defined, adopting definitions from Versioning Extensions to WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning): 'Version-Controlled Resource, Checked-Out'; 'Checked-Out Resource'; 'Version Resource'; 'Version History Resource'; 'Predecessor, Successor, Ancestor, Descendant'; 'Root Version Resource'; 'Working Resource '.

    The following link relations are defined: (1) all-versions: When included on a version controlled resource, this link points to a resource containing the version history for this resource. (2) latest-version: When included on a version controlled resource, this link points to a resource containing the latest (e.g., current) version. [[issue.latest.version: I think "latest" is misleading, as it may not be the "latest" when different branches are involved. JCR 1.0 has "base version", defined as "The base version of a particular node N is the one that will serve as the default immediate predecessor of the next version of N that is created." — can we adopt that? (see JCR v1.0 Specification, Section 8.2.3 The Base Version) —jre]] (3) working-copy: When included on a Checked-Out resource, this link points to a Working Resource. [[issue.working.resource.2: I think the working resource is checked out, and the link lives on either a version or version controlled resource (which stays checked in). —jre]] (4) predecessor-version: When included on a version resource, this link points to a resource containing the predecessor version in the version history...

  • [June 08, 2009] "CMIS, or DMIS?" By Kas . From assertTrue() Blog. With comments.

    "It occurred to me the other day that CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services, the proposed OASIS 'common protocol' for Enterprise Content Management) is actually a Document Management standard, not a Content Management standard. Its name should therefore be DMIS. For proof, one need look no further than the data model. 'Document' and 'Folder' are the principal first-class objects in the CMIS model. Thus, 'content' (the 'C' in 'CMIS') is assumed, by the authors of the standard, to mean 'document.' The CMIS data model is also RDBMS-centric and SQL-friendly (as it is in all good DM systems). It follows the tried-and-true relational model of every respected legacy DM system. I might add that the authors of the standard have basically declared WCM to be out of scope. Basically, anything that doesn't fit the 'everything is a document or a folder' model is either out of scope or will be extremely difficult to force-fit into the CMIS mold. At least, that's how it's starting to look to me..."

  • [June 08, 2009] "Open Text Looks to ECM Standard: CMIS Standard Could Provide Common Interface to Manage Structured and Unstructured Data." By Martin Courtney. From computing.co.uk (June 05, 2009).

    [...] "John Shackleton is chief executive of Open Text, an enterprise content management (ECM) company that provides software to help corporates and large government organisations manage different types of digital content and integrate that content with other software applications. He recently told Computing why the forthcoming content management interoperability services (CMIS) 1.0 standard, currently being finalised by OASIS, is a vital component for organisations looking to deal effectively with the morass of data being created. Shackleton: "Organisations are trying to deal with the explosion of email content, and to integrate structured [database] data and unstructured data [email text, audio, video, HTML web pages and so on]. Other organisations are in acquisition mode, which means they inherit multiple information repositories, ERP systems, and other data sets. CMIS offers a common interface for all that information, regardless of how it was originally created, which was not previously available, so that organisations can manage and analyse both structured and unstructured data side by side. This can alert them to information patterns they did not previously know about, or see business opportunities that were previously hidden, for example... The CMIS standard itself is already largely completed, though it will not be formally adopted and ratified in Autumn this year. We already have prototype software with CMIS 1.0 built in, though we are obviously working with the rest of the group to ensure compatibility. The biggest issue the media content types and file formats CMIS has to handle is changing all the time..."

  • [May 29, 2009] "Content Management Interoperability Services: Browser Bindings." [CMIS Browser Binding]. Posted by David Nuescheler (Day Software) to the OASIS CMIS TC List. Draft version 0.63 (first public draft). 30 pages. Known TODOs: describe error handling, map CMIS exceptions, relationship objects creation/modification/deletion. Unless otherwise stated, all references point to Version 0.63.c of the specification CMIS Part I — Domain Model.

    "This document describes the 'Browser Bindings' of CMIS. In early testing of the two existing Bindings (SOAP and AtomPub), despite being HTTP based, basic use cases can not be covered when using a standard web browser. The intention of this document is to cover that gap and make CMIS a 'Browser-enabled' protocol that delivers on the promise of 'Browser mash-up' as a use cases. Motivation: Currently the SOAP and AtomPub bindings of CMIS don't lend themselves to a straight forward consumption by standard web browsers and require the creation and use of large java script libraries for the most basic use cases. Other use cases as simple as 'uploading a file' even cannot be covered at all with a browser talking to a CMIS repository. The lack of this ability even triggered conversations in the TC about having server-sided proxies that would again speak a proprietary protocol just to able to translate CMIS to a protocol that allows for mash-ups and browser interaction, which seems like very undesirable effect when specifying an HTTP based protocol for consumption by browser. Since mash-ups and simple browser interaction is a stated goal and use case of CMIS this document tries to close this gap by introducing a lightweight and easy to consume binding that makes CMIS effective in a standard Web environment... The goal of this specification is to offer a simple protocol that is efficient from a network perspective and intuitive to use from a standard (javascript enabled) web browser. This document does not attempt to cover the full breadth of CMIS and will always compromise edge-cases for simplicity. Also this binding does not necessarily attempt to cover all the features and domain model expressed in CMIS, but there are no implicit limitations on how much of the domain model is covered. The binding should be designed in a fashion that allows web browsers and other web infrastructure (such as spiders) to easily introspect the contents of the repository and interact with it. The overall goal of this document is to produce a binding that is intuitive to use and hence ease of use is the most important guiding principal..." Editor's note: "First of all I would like to mention that the guiding principles and usecases are focused a very simple interaction with the browser using the domain model of CMIS delivering on the Mashup usecase. Consider this draft a wishlist from a browser application developers perspective, rather than something that has been vetted against potential implementation efforts on the server side. In our implementations we so far found that the protocol is simple to implement on the server side in general and extremely efficient over the wire given its very small network footprint... Dave Caruana kindly volunteered to help out with feedback in the process and has already sent some very thoughtful discussion points, but not all of those have been incorporated in this draft. Sorry about that and thanks a lot to Dave..." [Source PDF]

  • [May 29, 2009] A .NET Library and Toolbox for CMIS." By Barb Mosher. From CMSWire.

    "... We are all interested to see how SharePoint will implement CMIS; ee got a bit of feel for how it could speak to a CMIS compliant repository earlier this year ['Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007']... We also want to know how any .NET based content management system can implement CMIS. We may have the start of the happening now with a new CodePlex project in the works. Called the NCMIS: .NET Content Management Interoperability Services, this project has been created to develop a DotNet library that implements the core requirements of the CMIS spec and a toolbox to help you build your own implementation. It's still in the planning stages, but the CodePlex site outlines a number of items that could be put into the toolbox including things like Business Classes and related enums for all CMIS entities, Protocol handlers, Sample Producer, .NET CMIS Explorer and more. This project is just getting off the ground and they are looking for volunteers to contribute to the project. If you are dying to get your hands dirty with CMIS and .Net, head over the CodePlex project site and let them know you want to help..." NCMIS: .NET Content Management Interoperability Services is a "Dotnet library that will implement the core of the Content Management Interoperability Services standards proposal (CMIS) along with a toolbox for building your own implementations of CMIS. The goal of this project is to provide a library and toolbox that allows develops to produce and consume CMIS, as defined in the OASIS Proposal. It is still being developed, but here is an outline of the suggested contents of this library toolbox: (1) Business classes and related enums for all CMIS entities: Repository, Document, Folder, Policy, Relationship, Property; (2) Protocol handlers for REST/ATOM and SOAP as defined in the proposal; (3) Abstract base classes for producers that can be inherited and extended to implement your own CMIS producer; (4) Sample producer that you can use to test consumers against; (5) .NET based CMIS Explorer to explore and test your CMIS producers (6); CMIS validator; (7) ASP.NET Virtual Path Provider sample consumer; (8) System.IO sample producer..."

  • [May 26, 2009] "JCR - CMIS Comparison." By David Nuescheler (Day Software). Blog.

    David Nuescheler, serving as liaison between the Java Content Repository (JCR - JSR-170/283) and CMIS activities, provided a slideset presentation and summary of the similarities and differences. Summary: "There seems to be a desire to discuss the relationship between CMIS and JCR similar to the desire to discuss JCR and WebDAV or, more recently, JCR and Atom... (1) API vs. Protocol: JCR specifies an API (Application Programming Interface) while CMIS specifies two protocol bindings. Much like the Servlet API in Java and the HTTP protocol are complementary this is also the case for JCR and CMIS. Similar arguments have been made for Atom and WebDAV. JCR and CMIS are complementary in this aspect. (2) Focused Model vs. Generally Applicable Model: JCR specifies a very general model based Node and Properties that lends itself to the implementation of specific domain models. On the hand, CMIS specifies such a specific domain model for document management. The CMIS domain model can easily be implemented in a JCR model. Some people could say that if one were to implement CMIS from scratch a JCR repository would be the ideal starting point as it provides the perfect infrastructure to do that. I think it is one of the most important assets of CMIS that it exposes the domain model of document management. It will be helpful in further standard discussions to have an established consensus on the domain model amongst the document management vendors. (3) Every JCR repository is a CMIS repository: Based on this type of compatibility between CMIS and JCR Apache Chemistry (currently in incubation) implements CMIS on top of JCR, amongst other things. This turns every JCR compliant repository into a CMIS compliant repository without any development effort. Even better news are that Chemistry gets bootstrapped with numerous existing JCR repositories and connectors. These repositories can thus expose CMIS right from the start. (4) Interop vs. Infrastructure: There is always a tension in a specification to address both 'interop' and 'infrastructure' needs. Interop enables different repositories to be compatible on some level, whereas infrastructure provides users with a platform to build upon. There were tendencies in the JCR expert group to support users of the API in a way that they could build real-life applications. Hence, the infrastructure aspect was always a very important aspect. Because of that, the least common denominator aspects that come with 'interop' were only a part of the equation. For CMIS, offering general purpose infrastructure is a stated non-goal. CMIS is only concerned with 'interop'. Consequently, JCR is very successful with the number of users and applications built on top of JCR, while I believe that it is the goal of CMIS to be very successful with number of implementations... In terms of perception I think CMIS reduces the expectation on JCR to be a least common denominator interop spec. I welcome that because both specification efforts will be able to evolve in a more agile fashion when they focus on 'interop' and 'infrastructure' needs respectively. In summary, I am very excited to have a specification both on the protocol and on the API level addressing the needs of a more open standards based content management landscape..." [Note: Day Software is running a public instance of CRX (JSR-170 compliant repository) at http://jcr.day.com [with login: admin/admin; as of today there is also the CMIS interface (Atom binding) to that repository publicly available at http://cmis.day.com. The underlying code is the version from the CMIS plugfest at Basel.]

  • [May 22, 2009] "Proposal for Document Previews/Thumbnails in CMIS." Edited by David Caruana (Alfresco) and Ryan McVeigh (Oracle Corporation), with comment by members of the CMIS Technical Committee (Ethan Gur-esh, Al Brown, Steve Roth, Julian Reschke, etc). See the JIRA Issue: Document Thumbnail Proposal, and the related topic in the TC discussion list thread "Relationships in CMIS."

    "Some ECM repositories provide renditions where a client can get an alternative version of a document. This could apply to a preview case which would enable the client to preview the content of a document without needing to download the full content. Previews are generally reduced fidelity representations such as thumbnails. Renditions can take on any general form, such as a PDF version of a word document... This proposal offers an optional extension to CMIS for allowing a client to gain access to document renditions... This proposal advocates describing document previews in the CMIS Domain Model. This provides a formal definition of a preview which may be mapped by each of the CMIS bindings... Requirements for the Model: (1) A document may support zero or more renditions, where: (a) the server is responsible for determining the number and types of renditions present for a given document; (b) the server is responsible for the availability of a document rendition, and a rendition may not be immediately available after checkin; (c) renditions can be related to one another — such as an ordered list; we should be able to express this model as part of the rendition metadata; (d) renditions are specific to the version of the document and may differ between document versions. (2) Each rendition consists of a content stream containing the alternative representation; (3) Each rendition consists of a content stream of a given mimetype. (4) Each rendition may have a descriptive label. (5) Each rendition is loosely identified by label and mimetype — although uniqueness not enforced. (6) Each rendition may provide additional metadata such as sizing... Domain Model: Previews are themselves Documents. They are associated to their original document via relationships of the 'preview' relationship type. This proposal does not impose any constraints on whether preview documents are filed in folders or unfiled. [As proposed] Web Services Binding: No additional Web Service methods or adjustments to existing methods are required to support document previews, as getRelationships() and getContentStream() suffice. AtomPub Binding: As with the Web Service, the AtomPub binding does not strictly need enhancing to support document previews. However, the natural AtomPub use of links lends itself well to representing 'preview' relationships. For Atom Entries representing documents, each related preview is represented via the following link link rel="preview"...

  • [May 14, 2009] CMIS Access Control Lists. Proposal for Access Control Lists in CMIS. Version 0.84, 2009-05-14. 21 pages. See the reference page for Version 0.84 (May 15, 2009), via Paul Goetz (SAP), or later.

    "RECAP: Security in CMIS Specification 0.6: Version 0.6 of the CMIS specification draft contains a concept for policy objects (see Section 2.6 Policy Object). Access to certain aspects of an object can be restricted by a policy. Policies — like other primary entities of the CMIS specification — are typed, have an object ID and have properties... A policy is created using the Object Service's createPolicy method. Input for this method is a description of the policy (name, type, properties, etc.), output is an ID of the created policy instance. Providing this ID, a policy can be applied to a controllable object (applyPolicy), removed (removePolicy), or retrieved from an object (getAppliedPolicies) via the Policy Service. A controllable object can have zero or more policies applied. Not having a policy applied means that there is no restriction accessing the object.... ACL Design Objectives and Assumptions: The basic requirements for ACLs can be grouped by the following three levels. (1) Level 1 — Unified Search requires the ablity to discover who is allowed to read the content and properties of a document or folder. The scenario is that data from a CMIS repository is to be indexed by an external search engine: In order to filter relevant results for a given user efficiently, the search engine needs to add index information about 'who is allowed to read the search result', e.g., by extending the query... (2) Level 2 — Reporting Permissions is a requirement to distinguish different permissions, like READ, WRITE or DELETE. The scenario is that a user is able to figure out which other users she or he can collaborate on a shared document or folder (e.g., who can read, who can modify, and who can manage the permissions of a document). (3) Level 3 — Managing Permissions, is like Level 2, plus the requirement to be able to modify the ACL for a document or folder [and] like level 2, the scenario is that a user would like to allow other users (e.g., his or her team) to get access to a document or folder (e.g., that all the members of a team can collaborate on the same folder)... Thus, we assume that ACLs will be used mainly for collaborative user scenarios, where an end user needs to be able to control the permissions to be applied to documents or folders at runtime at least to allow content sharing and collaboration. E.g., 'My working drafts for the documentation should only be editable by my co-workers John and Mary, be visible to my team, but they must not to be seen by someone else outside the team'. In addition, we assume that at least a minimal set of permissions should be predefined, such that specific applications can rely on known semantics for this predefined permissions (like for Level 1 the indexing engine relies on the READ semantics). Another assumption is that for enterprise level security constraints, Policies are more appropriate than ACLs. Policies are intended to express security constraints more on an enterprise level and that are shared by several objects (e.g., 'job references in folder EMEA can be read by members of the HR department in the EMEA region only'). ACLs are intended as an additional mechanism for collaborative scenarios.... Theoretically, there would be different options on where the put the knowledge about the semantics for permissions. However, in the discussions it turned out that there shouldn't be too much semantics within the CMIS specification. This implies, that — except for the predefined permissions — it will be up to the client (usually the user then) to 'know' about the semantics of an ACL. Thus, the focus for this proposal is on abilities to marshall the information required to discover and manage ACLs for a user — and only to a minor extend to help applications to 'understand' the ACL (except for the predefined CMIS permissions)...."

  • [May 14, 2009] "Link Relations Proposal: Proposal for How Link Relations Should Be Named for CMIS." By Cornelia Davis and Al Brown, with members of the CMIS TC. Updated: Version 2009-05-15, from .DOC uploaded by Al Brown.

    See the associated Jira issue #181 "Naming of link relations: The current draft of CMIS defines new link relations. Some of these link relations should result in new values registered in the Atom Link Relations IANA registry, others should be defined as CMIS specific URIs and still others should leverage link relations that are already registered." Document description from the first version, posted by with Cornelia Davis (EMC): "I've completed the inventory of current link relations and have made an initial proposal on how each of the link relations should be named. I believe the next step is to form a working group to discuss... This document inventories all of the link relations currently included in version 0.61 of the RESTful AtomPub binding and suggests that either: (1) an already registered name be used, (2) that a new name be registered with the IANA, or (3) that a CMIS specific URI be used for the name. This document is the starting point for discussions in the TC." Introduction: "The following document lays out a proposal for naming of the currently proposed link relations. These suggestions are motivated by several things: (A) First, to use existing, registered names wherever possible. This will aid in interoperability, simplifies client development and offers the potential that existing clients do something meaningful with CMIS generated Atom feeds. (B) Identify those concepts that are not specific to CMIS for registration in the IANA. Again, the goal is interoperability. Just as CMIS is stronger through the leverage of existing link relations, future work can leverage the relations that CMIS brought if they are expressed with sufficient generality. (C) Link relations are about defining semantics for a relationship, not about dictating how a client behaves with respect to it, nor do link relations prescribe a media type for the resource that is the target of the link..." Examples: CMIS link relation: 'parent', Naming Suggestion: 'Up'; CMIS link relation: 'repository', Naming Suggestion: 'Service'; CMIS link relation: 'children', Naming Suggestion: 'Down'; CMIS link relation: 'descendants', Naming Suggestion: 'downall'; CMIS link relation: 'allversions', Naming Suggestion: 'Allversions'; CMIS link relation: 'latestversion', Naming Suggestion: 'Latestversion'; CMIS link relation: 'type', Naming Suggestion: 'Describedby'; CMIS link relation: 'Source', Naming Suggestion: 'Via'... With earlier comments by Julian Reschke, also here. See the posting and document source [cache]

  • [May 01, 2009] "Apache Software Foundation Launches Chemistry Incubation Effort for CMIS." Cover Pages Story. On April 30, 2009, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced the creation of a new Incubator project to support the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. As proposed, the Apache Chemistry Incubation development effort will implement the latest draft of the CMIS specification and provide input to the TC on the implementation details of the specification. It is also anticipated that the group will produce a CMIS Reference Implementation (RI) and a CMIS Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). Three Chemistry mailing lists have been set up, along with a Jira issues tracking system and SVN source code repository. According to the Apache Chemistry Proposal summary, Chemistry "is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like JavaScript) implementation of an upcoming CMIS specification, consisting of a high-level API for developers wanting to manipulate documents, a low-level SPI close to the CMIS protocol for developers wanting to implement a client or a server, and default implementations for all of the above. Chemistry aims to cover both the AtomPub and SOAP bindings defined by the CMIS specifications... The background to Apache Chemistry can be found (in source code) within the Chemistry codebase developed at Nuxeo and the JCR-CMIS sandbox components developed at Apache Jackrabbit. All contributions to the JCR-CMIS components in Jackrabbit have been made by people with Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) on file; this agreement is required before an individual is given commit rights to an ASF project. Rationale for the Apache Chemistry Incubation is provided in the proposal as follows (excerpt): "For the [CMIS] standard to succeed, ensuring interoperability is paramount: in order to manage an ever growing context and leverage the enormous portability and interoperability issues that a globally adopted Standard brings, it is necessary to think about how to make the related ecosystem healthy and sustainable... Successful modern standards are driven by clear documentation, a clearly defined compatibility process, accurate compliance criteria, and reference implementation to clear up potential doubts and ensure that the standard can actually be implemented in real life scenarios... Having an healthy ecosystem will ensure a smoother implementation process, more compliant products and, ultimately, a wider adoption of the standard."

  • [May 01, 2009] "Nuxeo's Take on Apache CMIS Implementation aka Chemistry." By Irina Guseva. Blog.

    Florent Guillaume reports: "Nuxeo, as an open source vendor, values interoperability a lot. And this is not just marketing-speak, we see CMIS as a key factor for customers who need a standardized way of accessing Nuxeo repositories from their applications without learning proprietary protocols or APIs... Conversely, CMIS will also allow customers to migrate data from other repositories, provided their vendors adopt CMIS as well. The more CMIS adoption we see, the more people will be able to make educated choices based on the intrinsic merits of a product, instead of being locked into their previous platforms and having to do costly product renewals because no clear transition path exists for them. Chemistry for us is an opportunity to promote standard adoption by providing a library of a well-defined API and an exhaustive coverage of the CMIS specification. Chemistry will be a bridge between different protocols and backends, following the CMIS domain model... We started working on a CMIS prototype in January, to investigate technical feasibility and gauge the level of complexity of a basic implementation. As a prototype it proved a success, and some useful bits of that code base will be moved to Chemistry in the near future... Through their involvement in the Jackrabbit project, Day had shown exemplar commitment to open standards and to the Apache Software Foundation. At the CMIS face-to-face meeting in January, David Nuescheler of Day had presented slides about his vision of a generic CMIS layer bridging clients and servers in a modular fashion. The prototype that Dominique Pfister (Day) and Paolo Mottadelli (SourceSense) had produced for the face-to-face was, however, very much tied to the JCR. Following these ideas, but beginning from scratch, I decided in February [2009] to start working on a repository-independent Java API that could then be bridged in both directions to clients or servers, as desired — this became the Chemistry project. Now that it has visibility through Jackrabbit and the incubator, more people have joined the effort, starting with Dominique, Paolo, and David of course but also a number of others..."

  • [May 01, 2009] "Comments on CMIS Link Relations." By Mark Nottingham [WWW]. Posting to the Atom-Syntax Syntax List and CMIS TC Comment List. April 30, 2009.

    "CMIS [v.61] specifies a large number of new link relations for use in Atom. A few comments and questions follow: (1) Each one of the link relations specifies a type of document that it references (with 'Mime/Type', although I note that the proper term is media type, and the values given are prose descriptions, not media types). Is the intent here to limit these relations to those types? If so, this is conflating the job of a link relation with a media type. Link relation types should not be specific to any single format. (2) Some of the proposed registrations seem to overlap with existing relation types (e.g., 'parents' whereas 'up' has already been registered; 'repository' where 'service' would probably do.). (3) Other proposed registrations seem to be very specific to your use case (e.g., 'streams', 'allowableactions'). These cases may be better served by using extension relations (i.e., URIs). (4) Of the remaining ones, it does seem like there are some useful things to register (e.g., 'child', 'latestversion'), but the language shouldn't be specific to your use case; they need to be generic. (5) In case you're not aware, there's a proposal circulating to revise the link relation registration process, as well as provide a framework for them; see https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/draft-nottingham-http-link-header/..."

  • [April 30, 2009] "CMIS PlugFest: Day 1." By Serge Huber (Chief Technology Officer, Jahia). From Serge's content: Thoughts on WCM and related technologies. Blog.

    "I'm currently in Basel, participating in the CMIS PlugFest. For those of you that are not familiar with CMIS, you might think of it to content management (well mostly document management right now, but that might change) as is SQL to databases. It is a standard that will hopefully help interoperability between content management systems. Day 1 started with some informal introductions, and setup of the existing servers. We now have OpenText, Alfresco and Jackrabbit+Chemistry servers up and running, and are running interoperability tests against those using a variety of clients, including OpenText that has a C++ plugin that connects Windows Explorer and as well as Office tools to CMIS back ends, SAP, Alfresco test units, two Flex-based clients (CMIS Explorer and CMIS Spaces), an Apache Chemistry CMIS Javascript client written by David Nuescheler at Day, an Apache Chemistry Java client that Florent Guillaume (Nuxeo software) is working hard on to commit hopefully before the end of the week. It's really great to see so much effort going into interoperability tests. The most interesting thing about CMIS is the momentum behind it, more than the technology, that will probably still evolve over the year. It is also very important to get the first version of the specification out as early as possible, because so many specifications fall into tech-limbo, to never be completed (802.11n, etc...). Apache Chemistry is also looking better than ever, having just been accepted into the incubator at Apache, and the code will probably be committed over the week-end. From then on hopefully the community will be able to have a look at it. This will also help interoperability, as even major vendors could use this code base to ensure compatibility..."

  • [April 30, 2009] "CMIS PlugFest (April 2009) Screenshots." By Cédric Hüsler (Technology Evangelist, Day Software).

    "Content Management Interoperability Services PlugFest - April 29-30, 2009 Day Software Office, Basel (Switzerland) Disclaimer: The screenshots show unreleased software. The CMIS specification is in Draft status and therefore all implementations are experimental. Slides show: SAP 'ECM Explorer, SourceSense 'Portlet', Jahia 'Raw CMIS Client, OpenText 'Explorer Extension', OpenText 'Office Extension', Alfresco 'JUnit TestSuite', Shane's Flex CMIS Explorer..." Comment by Piergiorgio Lucidi (Sourcesense).

  • [April 29, 2009] "Live from the CMIS Plugfest: Day 1." By Michael Marth. Blog.

    "Day 1 of the CMIS Plugfest is just getting into the beer-oriented phase. But before I leave I would like to share some basics of what we are up to... Today's participants are: Berry van Halderen (Hippo), Cédric Hüsler (Day), Dave Caruana (Alfresco), David Nuescheler (Day), Dominique Pfister (Day), Florent Guillaume (Nuxeo), Florian Mueller (OpenText), Jens Huebel (OpenText), Martin Hermes (SAP), Paul Goetz (SAP), Serge Huber (Jahia), Ugo Cei (SourceSense), Volker John (Saperion), and myself [Michael Marth]. By now all clients and servers are running on version 0.6(.1) of the CMIS spec. For the Atom binding we have as clients: the Javascript client from the Apache Chemistry project; the Java client from the Apache Chemistry project; Alfresco; SAP; Shane Johnson's Flex-based CMIS Explorer; the CMIS Explorer portlet from Sourcesense. Servers with Atom bindings are: Day CRX; Nuxeo; OpenText; Alfresco. That gives us 28 combinations to have fun with already. On top of that we have SOAP-based clients from OpenText and SAP (and the same list of servers)..."

  • [April 24, 2009] "ECM/CMIS: Microsoft SharePoint and CMIS." By Dick Weisinger (Vice President, and Chief Technologist, Formtek, Inc). Formtek Blog.

    "CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) is a light-weight services-based interface specification for accessing documents and metadata in content management systems. EMC, IBM and Microsoft were founding members of the committee that created the CMIS specification. CMIS is now being reviewed and modified by OASIS and is expected to be finalized by late 2009 or early 2010. While CMIS is not complete, working prototypes of CMIS implementations and CMIS applications are popping up. EMC/Documentum and Alfresco have CMIS repository implementations. Microsoft SharePoint too has an example of how it will be able to interoperate using CMIS with external non-SharePoint repositories. The Sharepoint example was described in a Microsoft technical MSDN article and reported by CMSWire. It describes how an external repository can be configured to be accessed by SharePoint. Access to the repository is coordinated with the SharePoint Single-Sign-On service. Once connected, basic repository services with CMIS can be used, like check in, check out, versioning and delete... The example is simple, but it shows that CMIS has the possibility of having a huge impact on ECM space. The analogy rings true that CMIS can become a standard for unstructured data in a similar way that SQL became a standard for database-driven applications. The focus of ECM will likely shift from core repository capabilities to application functionality..."

  • [April 20, 2009] "The Challenge of CMIS." By 'Pie' Laurence Hart. Blog.

    I started this to talk about some of the things out there, but there is sooo much that I am drawing the line. Kas is writing some good things on CMIS as he attempts to grok it. Others, like Jon Marks, are grappling with CMIS as well. They raise some excellent points that probably deserve posts unto themselves. I find myself, today, focusing on the more immediate and of the more 'outside-the-box' thoughts... First, in case you missed it, the 0.61c version of CMIS is currently out. A lot of little things, but some solid progress... CMIS, The Right Choice? Saw a bunch of posts stream out from Stiphane Croisier about CMIS. They offer a fresh perspective, but I'm not sure that he fully gets it, yet. He doesn't appear to have been living ECM for ages, but has a strong WCM/web viewpoint, and he likes CMIS so I am inclined to like him. They are good viewpoints to read though because, agree with them or not, he represents part of the audience for CMIS. One post talks about CMIS being disruptive. I don't think it will be for ECM, but possibly for WCM and portals. I think the Drupal/Alfesco integration using CMIS is just the first example of how things might change in the WCM world. Disruptive is a strong word, but it could be that big to WCM. Think of the impact to other content-focused applications. Take SharePoint. The next version, SharePoint 2010, will be out in the first half of next year with the tech preview in Q3 2009. As they already have CMIS examples with the current version, I see great things in the future. If you can tie SharePoint into a back-end repository with CMIS, the scalability concerns are almost gone. Who needs RBS or EBS? Disruption is almost the opposite of what may happen with SharePoint support, which may not be a bad thing. Then there is the whole CMIS versus the old guard, WebDAV, JSR-283, and ODMA. All have their uses, but none are ideal or do what CMIS does... Yes, CMIS is missing a lot of things. Transactions is one thing that we need badly. I am depending on the statements of the TC, the people, that say this is going to be version 1.0 of several versions. If this is true, then life is good. It isn't even at 1.0 yet, so small changes can occur (though Kas, I think the 'folder' object is a neutral and broad term). Policies are interesting and could be great depending on how each vendor unitizes the object. We'll see. It is spring, so it is a time of hope. After all, who would have seen Microsoft, IBM, and EMC band together to create it, much less invite Alfresco, Oracle, SAP, and Open Text to play? I plan on dating, seriously, CMIS 1.0. When version 2.0 comes out, I'll know that CMIS is serious and I can truly commit..." With followups from Craig Randall, Stephane Croisier, Julian Reschke, Serge Huber, Brian Huff (Bex), Florent Guillaume,

  • [April 14, 2009] "CMIS and Seam Portlet." Followup to April 08, 2009 Blog, part of 'Alfresco Integration with JBoss Portal'. By Jeff Brown (Senior Architect, CityTech Inc). Also published from the JBoss Portal.

    "[...] After working to display the CMIS objects in a tree structure, I wanted to share what I had learned. I have enhanced the Browser tab to display the CMIS objects from Alfresco in a hierarchical tree structure... To do this, I used the RichFace 'recursiveTreeNodesAdaptor' component to build a dynamic tree based on the CMIS calls to Alfresco. As its name implies, you feed it CMIS objects in a recursive fashion to display as a tree. In my case, I then cached the objects in Seam's Conversational state to make subsequent retrievals faster. The component also allows different UI looks, which I based on the CMIS object's baseType property... A common use case we see is clients wishing to integrate Alfresco ECM with or within their existing portal products... I will discuss a few of the approaches that are now available as well as my thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of each. (1) Alfresco Presentation Web Script and JSR-168 Portlet. (2) Alfresco Data Web Script and JSR-168 Portlet... (3) CMIS and Seam Portlet: The direct web script access as described in options #1 or #2 both also have a potential drawback in that they are both proprietary to Alfresco. If you ever switch or add an additional content management system to the mix, you would be starting from scratch. However, the very good news is that Alfresco v3.0 introduced one of the first CMIS implementations and I see it is now available as a technology preview in Alfresco v3.1. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a specification developed by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, and a few other vendors including Alfresco. The purpose of CMIS is to allow developers to use a common API to access any content management system that offers as CMIS implementation. This is a bit like using SQL to access any relational database — really a no-brainer I think. Alfresco implements their CMIS API on top of both web scripts, which we discussed above, and SOAP web services. So, you have a choice to use CMIS via RESTful or SOAP web services. Per the specification, the RESTful binding uses the ATOM Publishing Protocol. For my purposes, I chose to use the REST/ATOM binding. I mentioned that Alfresco based their CMIS REST binding on top of their web scripts platform. However, unless you look under the covers, you really don't know or care that this is the case. As a client, you deal only with the CMIS API. This means your client portlet code is not tied to Alfresco. It will work with any system that provides a CMIS implementation. Further, using CMIS means your XML parsing can be standardized and re-usable since it must follow the ATOM protocol. You are no longer tied to parsing whatever XML the web script author decided to deliver. In my example, I decided to use a Seam application to act as the Alfresco client using the CMIS REST/ATOM binding. I then exposed the Seam application as a portlet within the JBoss Portal. I chose Seam because I knew I was going to need the paging, caching, and session management it provides and I did not want to write or worry about all that — I had my hands full coming up to speed first on the CMIS specification and then on the ATOM/APP protocol. I used JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 4.3 which contains a tech preview the required JSR-301 portlet bridge to expose the Seam application as a portlet. This should also work in the latest JBoss Community portal or as a standalone web application running in JBoss, Tomcat, or any of the other major app vendors... I like this approach because it can work against any content management system that has a CMIS implementation, not just Alfresco. This is a big deal, because many of our clients have a mix of CMS systems in their enterprise. With this approach, the same portlet can access them all with the same code base. You will need to become familar with CMIS, ATOM/APP, and then Abdera if you choose to use it. This is new technology so that introduces some risk. CMIS is only at 0.5 version and will probably change a bit. It is also not supported by Alfresco as part of the enterprise edition and only provided as a preview..."

  • [April 13, 2009] "Standards in Content Management." By Justin Cormack (Head of Technology, Squiz). From Technology of Content: Ramblings on the Technology Of Content Management.

    "[Roy] Fielding's substantive criticism [of CMIS] is that it's just trying to model folders and files, and a WEBDAV interface does that fine. JSR defines abstract item and property trees, that the CMIS players feel don't fit with their content models. The CMIS draft mentions webdav, but says it misses out on types and queries, locking, and not HTTP interfaces(!). Jon Marks points to the XPATH/SQL distinction. XPATH too is a bit modern for the CMIS vendors. The XPATH expressions refer to the XML representation of the property tree, which if it does not actually correspond at all to your internal models or implementation method is quite a lot of work to implement. There is some truth in the implementation specific parts of the criticism of JSR, in that I am not aware of any implementation of the JSR standards that does not use a JSR native content repository as the base implementation (eg Jackrabbit). Maybe I have missed one. Partially that is because it is a strong model for a moderns CMS, with excellent open and closed source implementations. Partly also that not many vendors have yet explored related but dissimilar frameworks (it is not clear that an RDF model would fit well for example as properties are first class; though a mapping may be possible the semantics of an object may end up differing). The other area in which differences will probably become apparent are the versioning models, though these will not necessarily be exposed through interfaces if there is a big mismatch. In an abstract sense the differences in the two models seem small. In CMIS documents have a (single) body and then additional properties. In JSR objects simply have properties, the 'content' is simply anther property. Although that sounds subtle and easy to switch models - just add a type property and a content property to documents, not to folders, there are more and more model differences the further you go. Locking for example. And the rules about folders not being versioned while files are, and the primacy of the document folder containment relationship. Another difference in CMIS is the large list of optional facilities, such as the query types available, and whether checked out copies or versioned copies of documents are accessible through the query mechanisms..."

  • [April 13, 2009] "Coming to Grips with CMIS." By Kas Thomas (Analyst, CMS Watch). From assertTrue( ) Blog.

    "[...] Here are a few first impressions [about CMIS]. I offer these impressions as constructive criticism, BTW, not pot-shots. I want to see CMIS succeed. Which also means I want to see it done right. The v0.5 draft doc for the Domain Model says there are four top-level ('first class', root) object types: Document, Folder, Relationship, and Policy. Support for the Policy type is optional. So there are basically three root types. Already I question whether there shouldn't perhaps be a top-level object type ('CMISObject') that everything inherits from, rather than four root objects, since presumably all four basic object types will share at least a few characteristics in common. The doc says that Administration is out of scope for CMIS. But later on, we learn that 'A policy object represents an administrative policy that can be enforced by a repository.' We also find applyPolicy and removePolicy operations, which are clearly administrative in intent. Remarkably, Policy objects can be manipulated through standard CMIS CRUD operations but do not have a content stream and are not versionable. However, they 'may be' fileable, queryable, or controllable. Why are we treating this object as a file ('fileable') but not allowing it to be versionable? And why are we pretending it doesn't have a content stream? And why are we saying 'may be'? This is too much fuzziness, it seems to me. Right now, the way CMIS Part I is worded, a 'policy' can be anything. One might as well call it Rules. Or Aspects. Or OtherStuff. The word Policy has a specific connotation, though. Where I come from, it implies things like compliance and governance, things that MAY intersect role constraints, separation of duties, RBAC, and possibly a lot more; and yes, these concepts do come up in content management, in the context of workflow. But it seems to me that policy, by any conventional definition, is rather far afield from where CMIS should be concentrating right now. If 'policy' means something else here, let's have a good definition of it and let's hear the argument for why it should be exposed to client apps. I say drop the Policy object type entirely... The Folder object type, OTOH, is too concrete for my tastes. We need to stop thinking in terms of 'folder' (which is a playful non-geek term for 'directory', designed to make file systems understandable by people who know about manila folders), and think more abstractly. What notion(s) are we really trying to encapsulate with the object type currently dubbed 'Folder'? At first blush, it would seem as though navigability (navigational axes) constitute(s) the core notion, but the possible graphs allowed by Folder do not match popular navigational notions inherent in file-system folders (at least on Windows). In other words, the many-to-many parent-child mappings allowed by CMIS's Folders destroy the conventional 'folder' metaphor, unless you're a computer science geek, in which case you don't think in terms of folders anyway..." Note: Comments by Greg Turnquist, Michael Marth, etc.

  • [April 09, 2009] "CMIS - Is XPath Just A Bit Too Tricksy?" By Jon Marks (LBi). From Jon On Tech: Confessions of a Digital Agency Nerd (Blog).

    "[...] CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services ) looks pretty sweet and, according to the general buzz, is going to do well. The recent demo at AIIM, and the examples created by various vendors have made the effort feel very alive. For the uninitiated, CMIS is a lowest common denominator API which can sit on top of any Enterprise Content Management repository. It has many practical uses, including a search across multiple ECM repositories, workflows and processes that span repositories and, my favourite, an ECM Mashup... The CMIS goal has a lot in common with the Java Content Repository (JSR 170/283). The main difference that everyone cites is the fact the JCR interface is Java only, while CMIS allows access to any implementation. CMIS is much simpler, which may give it the kiss of life that the more functionally rich JCR seems to lack. CMIS is accessed via a remote API, while the JCR is accessed via Java methods, but I don't think this difference is fundamental. The CMIS specification could have added a remote HTTP access protocol on top of the JCR to overcome the differences mentioned. Most of the contributors to the CMIS specification were also involved in the JCR, so the fact that this didn't happen suggests to me that they felt something else was amiss. Get your chainsaws out 'cause I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the main difference between CMIS and the JCR API lies in the query language choice - XPath versus SQL. Note that SQL is an optional extra in the JCR spec, while XPath currently isn't an option in CMIS... When reading the spec, I kept asking myself why the query language chosen is based on SQL (called CMIS SQL or CQL), not XPath like the JCR... Wearing my developer hat, I think the API would be more useful if I could interogate it using XPath. However, from the point of view of the ECM vendor based on a relational database, maybe implementing an XPath search on their respository is just too damn hard! One would think that the vendors that support JCR already have done most of the heavy lifting. But not many vendors have implemented it, and maybe of those that have use Apache Jackrabbit. So, in summary, my theory is that an XPath based query language is very difficult for the vendors to implement. Which means developers of CMIS clients are gonna have to bite the bullet and use CSQL. Which is still going to be great, and means we're going to get far more CMIS enabled repositories than JCR ones. Which hopefully means the Day CMIS PlugFest is going to be a very busy event. But I do so love XPath, and here's hoping that it makes it into a later version of the specification..." Note: this article has several followups, including comments by Florent Guillaume ("Mainly, XPath has not been used because the repository vendors aren't too fond of it (most of them are SQL guys). Note also that in JCR 2 'JSR-283' SQL has become the primary mandatory query language, and XPath is deprecated...") and Al Brown ("... the issue with XPath was since many vendors did not natively support that style, when XPath limitations were encountered (and they were) adding support for XQuery became problematic. CMIS is based on the idea of standardizing the 80% of what all the vendors do and do well. It is backward looking by design. This decreases the cost and makes it an easier decision on whether to support the effort or not...")

  • [April 08, 2009] "We Live in Interesting DAM Times." By Kas Thomas. From CMS TrendWatch Blog.

    "[...] We've been talking to a number of DAM vendors lately, and it's exciting to see so much new R&D and capability buildout going on at a time when activity in certain other spaces is (by comparison) rather slack, due to cost-cutting and other factors... One of the more noteworthy trends that's emerging that's wise for all to embrace is an understanding that rich-media types (Flash, AVI, MPEG, mp3 and others), because of their growing pervasiveness, need to be treated as 'first-class' content types in the enterprise. This means they need first-class 'content services' supporting them: version control, security, logging, workflow, collaboration services, lifecycle management, and so on. Traditionally, DAM systems have not done these ECM sorts of things well, and so-called ECM tools have been more document-oriented than media-oriented (hence the need for DAM in the first place). It's going to be a while before DM and DAM fuse together (if indeed they ever do). This leads, of course, to discussions around systems integration, something DAM products have been notoriously poor at supporting, and enterprises often don't plan for adequately. That may be starting to change. The FeedRoom, which acquired ClearStory's ActiveMedia last fall and also sells a video aggregation and transformation/transcoding platform called FeedRoom Enterprise Video Platform, have decided to attack the problem by embracing CMIS as its primary integration API. The FeedRoom has already begun to write code that will very shortly be tested by beta customers. The fact that vendors are already writing code against a standard that technically isn't a standard yet (and won't be, until OASIS blesses it around the end of this year) doesn't surprise me — we know of others who are writing code against CMIS already — but what is surprising is that it's a DAM company (not an ECM company that happens to have a DAM product), and The FeedRoom is not one of the original sponsors of CMIS... Content is getting richer and more interactive by the day. The state of the economy doesn't really play a role in this: content gets richer on its own whether you want it to or not. This is driving some important changes in the way people are thinking about content. Metadata matters more; storage (and the ability to remove content as soon as it's no longer needed) matters more. Interoperability between silos matters more. The puzzle pieces are morphing more quickly now. Agility matters. All of this points to a bright future for DAM, near-term as well as medium-term..." [Note: complete support for DAM features was declared out of scope for CMIS, at least initially.]

  • [April 07, 2009] "Upcoming CMIS Webinar." Posted by Laurence Hart 'Pie'. Blog.

    "Just wanted to take a quick break to let everyone know that I will be speaking on Alfresco's webinar on CMIS this Thursday, April 9th [2009], at Noon EDT. 'Unleashing CMIS: From Federated Search to Developer Tools' gives an introduction to CMIS, including some history, and then dives into the creation of the AIIM iECM Committee's CMIS Demo. I'll be talking about the entire process and then showing a brief demo of the actual application. At the end there will be a Question and Answer session. So if you missed the talk at AIIM, or are just late coming to the CMIS party, come along and see the first multi-vendor CMIS implementation..." From the Webinar page: "The Content Management Inter-operability Standard (CMIS) was talk of the town at the AIIM conference in Philadelphia (March 30, 2009 - April 2, 2009). Alfresco was front-and-center, not only as as a participant in the Content Management System Federated Search demonstration... but also with the 'CMIS on a Stick' USB drive. Branded by many as 'the best giveaway of the show'. CMIS is to Content Management Systems, what SQL is to Databases. It facilitates federated search. It further simplifies the embedding of Alfresco for OEMs. Developers can build and test CMIS applications using Alfresco which then can be deployed on SharePoint, EMC, IBM, or OpenText... Come and learn about the explosive possibilities of CMIS for your business. Featuring Laurence Hart, the lead implementer of the federated search at AIIM. As well as Paul Hampton and Yong Qu, implementers from the Alfresco team. You will also get access to CMIS in the Cloud (an online version of CMIS on a stick). The developer kit includes example code for connecting Alfresco to Joomla! and Drupal. Plus examples of CMIS using Java, Flex, Javascript, and Alfresco, as well as a live Alfresco system to develop and test CMIS applications. 'CMIS has huge momentum and will become the foundation for building a new generation of content collaboration and social computing applications,' said John Newton, CTO, Alfresco Software. This is a huge step forward for Content Management Systems in 2009. Demystify CMIS, and enable your organization..."

  • [March 25, 2009] "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)." Panel Presentation. Presenter: David Choy, OASIS CMIS Technical Committee Chair. Venue: AIIM Expo, Doculabs LIVE!. Thursday, April 2, 2009. Expo floor, at AIIM Booth 434. 11:30am.

    "Today's businesses can no longer afford to have essential business content trapped in separate, incompatible repositories. Furthermore, developing and maintaining an application for different repository environments is very costly. A platform-agnostic interoperable interface that can be easily layered on top of most content repositories is therefore a necessity to bring the content management industry to maturity, in a manner similar to what SQL did for the data management industry. Backed by major content management vendors, CMIS is an OASIS effort to define such a standard. This presentation gives a quick overview of CMIS, including its motivations, design points, and current status..." See the posting by David Choy to the CMIS TC discussion list: "There will be an informal CMIS panel at AIIM Expo next Thursday, April 2... All CMIS TC members (or their proxies) are invited to participate on this panel... I am scheduled to give a CMIS overview at 11:30am, followed immediately by this panel (around noon). This panel is organized by AIIM (Betsy Fanning). Thomas Pole, iECM co-chair and organizer of the CMIS demo, will be the moderator..."

  • [March 19, 2009] "Content as a Service." By Andrew Webb. Open for Business (Optaros Blog).

    "[...challenges:] how to search across this content, reuse content across different assets, manage the content in a consistent manner and enable it to be accessed and displayed through different channels and technologies. There have been some attempts already to try and provide consistent access to content. One example is the Content Repository API for Java (JCR) which has had some adoption... A much more promising solution lies in an emerging open standard for content access driven by OASIS. It is the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. It effectively does for content what SQL did for data by providing a standard interface. All the major ECM vendors are participating in this standard including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and Vignette. Standards of course live or die by their adoption so it is important to have such large players on board already with this new standard. Open source solutions often lead the charge and help progress standards and Alfresco is leading the charge with CMIS. The standard is currently at v0.5 and being a new standard is embracing current web service standards such as REST and JSON. In addition to having the content repositories supporting the CMIS standard it is going to be equally important to have front end client support to facilitate easy access and rendering of content from backend CMIS compliant repositories. Encouragingly there is already some activity in this area with several client connectors being developed. Many of these are listed on the Alfresco wiki and include Drupal, Joomla and Flex/Air clients. These are not Alfresco specific but as Alfresco has progressed faster than others in supporting CMIS for their repository the CMIS clients developed have been tested against it. So CMIS is an enabling standard to support the concept of content as a service. As it matures and becomes widespread it will increase in adoption and help enable solutions that leverage content as a service. These solutions could provide dashboards and management tools to help manage content across many repositories as well as tools to help monetize the access to the content. One good example of the potential for content as a service is that of the Guardian who have opened up access to their content (including monetizing it) with their open platform..."

  • [March 18, 2009] CMIS at AIIM International Meeting. Alfresco Software Announcement: "Alfresco Drives CMIS Discussions at AIIM. Alfresco Founder to Present on CMIS and Participate in AIIM CMIS Demo and Host Networking Events."

    "Alfresco Software, Inc. announced that John Newton, Alfresco Chairman and CTO will present at AIIM International in Philadelphia, March 30, 2009 — April 2, 2009 on the impact of the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. In addition, Mark Vermette from CRIX, an Alfresco customer, will present jointly with Dr Ian Howells, Alfresco CMO, on the benefits of using open source technology to accelerate collaboration and information flows. Other Alfresco activities at the conference include participation in the AIIM CMIS demonstration as well as partner networking events and integration/solution demonstrations at the Alfresco booth... CMIS will take center stage at this year's event as AIIM plans to leverage the new draft specification to host a federated demonstration allowing attendees to access conference materials stored in multiple content management systems (CMS). The proposed CMIS standard currently is being advanced by an OASIS technical committee and is designed to enable content to be accessed regardless of CMS. Developers can build and test CMIS applications using Alfresco which then can be deployed on SharePoint, EMC, IBM, or OpenText. Alfresco is participating in the AIIM CMIS demonstration by providing access to a hosted Alfresco implementation, which uses an Alfresco ECM repository and delivers out-of-the-box, collaborative content management. The OASIS Technical Committee expects to reach standards approval on CMIS by the end of 2009. Alfresco also will make a CMIS and Cloud Computing Developer Kit available to AIIM attendees. The developer kit includes example code for connecting Alfresco to Joomla! and Drupal, plus examples of CMIS using Java, Flex, Javascript and Alfresco, as well as a live Alfresco system to develop and test CMIS applications... Partner demonstrations on the Alfresco booth will be delivered daily at scheduled times and will include 'Optaros: Drupal and Alfresco Integration Built Using CMIS'..."

  • [March 17, 2009] "CMIS, My Vision. By Alex de Groot. Blog (Sitecore).

    "[...] What is CMIS? It is a standard for communicating between different ECM installations. There's a big need for the possibility to interexchange documents including metadata between these systems. These documents often have a lot of metadata and also their folder structure tells a lot about their semantics. As every vendor has its own idea about how to store this data, it is very important to have an common format for communication otherwise exchange of documents becomes impossible or very expensive... CMIS is not just about PDFs or Word documents. It does include movies, illustrating images and results of collaborated documents as well. As soon as the standard will reach its public stages, we as Sitecore, but all the purely WCM vendors should definitely start supporting this standard. But not as a content producer. ECM and DM will continue to focus on creating documents. Although WCM can deliver this, their main target is a markup languages. WCM is very good in producing (X)HTML, XML and image manipulation. Its strength is definitely not creating PDFs or so. Most WCM vendors are capable of doing it technically, but they cannot facilitate the quality process steps ECM can. Therefore it doesn't make a lot of sense to integrate the whole standard a producer. But as a consumer it does. Often documents get published out of intranets and other collaboration environments. It does make sense to be able to consume these documents and use them on all kind of web pages... This whole CMIS standard, all the attention and discussion around it will hopefully open the discussion for standardizing WCM solutions as well. Similar to DM I think that it would be good to come to an exchange format which allows WCMS's to exchange data but in a more specific way than RSS and Atom do these day..."

  • [March 13, 2009] Content Management Interoperability Services Version 0.60. Part II — ReSTful AtomPub Binding. Committee Working Draft. March 14, 2009. Edited by Al Brown and Ethan Gur-Esh for the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC. 43 pages. See the associated posting, reference page, schemas (ZIP), and .doc source. See also Part I: Domain Model v06. See the file listing for the schemas ZIP file (schema, unit test cases, ant script for jaxb/jax-ws generation), and source ZIP, as posted.

    "This specification defines the ReSTful AtomPub based binding... The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) ReSTful AtomPub binding specification defines a specification based on AtomPub that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories. Overview: "The REST binding has one mode: Pure-Atom following naming conventions and additional information in Atom documents. The client will request the service document at the URL provided by vendor. The client will then choose a collection, and then start accessing the repository. The URI for different items are found off of the atom feed document in the link tags for operations Atom or APP does not natively support. The tags have special names that will be registered with IANA. Optional parameters are passed in as HTTP arguments for non-default behavior. Custom properties will be part of the CMIS namespace using generic property tags. Special collections have been created that have semantic meaning beyond collection membership. These are: (1) Unfiled: All documents added to this collection will be removed from all other collections; (2) Checkedout: All documents added to this collection will be checkedout... Authentication will be handled by the transport protocol; support for HTTP Basic authentication is recommended. Response Formats: The client can specify in HTTP the Accept header which specifies which formats are acceptable to the client. With this mechanism the client can chose which response format the CMIS should respond with. CMIS compliant implementation MUST support this one response format: application/atom+xml. The CMIS repository will chose the response format based on the Accept header if specified... The CMIS repository is free to support other formats such as: [a] application/x-javascript (or text/javascript) for JSON, [b] text/html for an HTML interface to the API. Optional Arguments: The binding supports adding optional parameters to CMIS resources to modify default behavior. These arguments would be appended to the URI specified. CMIS implementations MUST support arguments being specified as HTTP arguments. If optional arguments are specified by the client, the server must return a Content-Location header with the more specific URI of the resource if one exists. Method Overrides: In case there is a proxy that is blocking PUT and DELETE, X-Method-Override header should be supported... CMIS introduces two new mime types for a CMIS Query document and a CMIS AllowableActions document: Application/cmisquery+xml and Application/cmisallowableactions+xml. In addition to those mime types specified by CMIS, CMIS also leverages these mimetypes: APP Service, Atom Entry, Atom Feed..."

  • [March 11, 2009] Mapping ICOM and CMIS Abstract Models: Liaison between OASIS CMIS TC and OASIS ICOM TC. Presentation prepared by Eric S. Chan, Chair of the OASIS ICOM TC.

    Per the posting: "I am initiating the liaison between CMIS and ICOM technical committees to leverage each other's technologies. I have attached the slides describing the ICOM TC Charter and potential mappings between ICOM and CMIS abstract models...." Excerpt from the prose portion of the presentation (see UML model diagrams for details): "ICOM TC Charter Scope is to (1) specify the normative standards for collaboration objects, along with their attributes, relationships, constraints, and behavior, and (2) to specify the non-normative guidelines (providing architectures or use-case scenarios) for a new workspace-oriented protocol for shared workspaces that support a full range of collaboration activities. [However] the detail bindings of ICOM abstract model to any specific programming languages and over-the-wire protocols will be handled through separate related TCs... Mappings between ICOM and CMIS: ICOM abstract model can define standard object types in CMIS. ICOM calendar, task list, forum, topic, address book, conference, and trash can define standard folder types in CMIS ICOM document, unified message, instant message, wiki page, contact, calendar occurrence, calendar invitation, task to do, task assignment, etc., can define standard document types in CMIS ICOM subscription, reminder, workflow, and access control can define standard policy types in CMIS ICOM n-nary bond can represent a group of 1-1 relationships in CMIS... The proposed ICOM entity is a tuple with a globally unique ID and an optional name. Virtually all ICOM objects are entities, some of which can map to CMIS Folder, Document, Policy, and Relationship objects. Access to every entity is controlled through an access control policy. Each entity can have zero or more markers, subscriptions, reminders, and bonds associated with it... ICOM Marker: ICOM Marker (includes Tag/Label and Category) needs a counterpart in CMIS — new object type in CMIS? [...]" Document source: .PPT, archive.

  • [March 08, 2009] Content Management Interoperability Services — Domain Model Version 0.6. Working Draft 25-February-2009. Edited by Ethan Gur-esh for the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC. 85 pages. See also Part II: ReSTful AtomPub Binding, v0.60. See the posting "CMIS Spec Part I - Domain Model - v0.6" by Ethan Gur-esh to the OASIS CMIS TC discussion list and the reference page. [Source .doc]

    Abstract: "The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard defines a domain model (in this document) and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. The CMIS interface is designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. It is not intended to prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those CM systems, nor to exhaustively expose all of the CM system's capabilities through the CMIS interfaces. Rather, it is intended to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by a CM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities... Data Model: CMIS provides an interface for an application to access a Repository. To do so, CMIS specifies a core data model that defines the persistent information entities that are managed by the repository, and specifies a set of basic services that an application can use to access and manipulate these entities. In accordance with the CMIS objectives, this data model does not cover all the concepts that a full-function ECM repository typically supports. Specifically, transient entities (such as programming interface objects), administrative entities (such as user profiles), and extended concepts (such as compound or virtual document, work flow and business process, event and subscription) are not included. However, when an application connects to a CMIS service endpoint, the same endpoint MAY provide access to more than one CMIS repositories. (How an application obtains a CMIS service endpoint is outside the scope of CMIS. How the application connects to the endpoint is a part of the protocol that the application uses.) An application SHALL use the CMIS 'Get Repositories' service (getRepositories) to obtain a list of repositories that are available at that endpoint. For each available repository, the Repository MUST return a Repository Name, a Repository Identity, and an URI. The Repository Identity MUST uniquely identify an available repository at this service endpoint. Both the repository name and the repository identity are opaque to CMIS. Aside from the 'Get Repositories' service, all other CMIS services are single-repository-scoped, and require a Repository Identity as an input parameter. In other words, except for the 'Get Repositories' service, multi-repository and inter-repository operations are not supported by CMIS..."

  • [March 08, 2009] Content Management Interoperability Services Part I: Namespace Proposal. Version 0.1 (initial working draft). Posted by Jens Hübel to the CMIS TC discussion list. 5 pages. See the posting and the reference document.

    Motivation: "The current 0.5 version of the CMIS specification defines the object type query name and the property name as identifiers according to SQL 92 rules. During the face-to-face meetings and in various discussions proposals have come up to extend this naming to a more powerful mechanism by introducing namespaces. The following proposal is an approach to extend the CMIS specification with a simple concept of namespaces, being widely compatible with the existing specification. The proposal focuses on type query names and property names. Introducing namespaces provides the following advantages: (1) The CMIS specification defines a set of standard properties. An existing repository may have its own properties with the same names but with different semantics or different sets of constraints. A namespace allows clearly distinguishing between CMIS properties and repository or type specific properties. (2) Certain repositories allow using the same name of a property to be used at more than one place with a different meaning. Common property names like 'Name' or 'Invoice' might exist in different flavors and in different application contexts. (3) Future versions of the CMIS specifications may define additional standard properties (e.g., for Records Management). By introducing a separate namespace for the CMIS standard we can guarantee backwards compatibility between a newer version of the specification and an existing repository or application implementation. (4) A namespace can be the foundation to introduce extended properties (e.g., hierarchies). Here are some relationships to other upcoming proposals, for example Aspects/Mixins that should be synchronized. Using namespaces is optional with the exception of the CMIS standard properties. A repository that does not support namespaces can provide the same implementation as for the 0.5 version of the CMIS spec and is still CMIS conformant... Proposed Changes: Add section Part I, Section Content / Data Model / Namespaces... Namespaces are identifiers according to the SQL 92 rules for identifiers. Namespaces can be used to structure type query names and property names and to ease providing unique identifications. Namespaces are separated from the type query name, property name or other namespaces by a colon (':') and can be hierarchical. Examples are 'myrepository:name' or 'MyRepository:Finance:Order:OrderNumber'. Using a namespace is optional..." See the followup comment from Julian Reschke: "I agree that namespaces are a good way to solve the use cases that the proposal mentions. However, I'm concerned that by adopting this, CMIS would adopt a namespace concept that is totally different from the ones in related specifications (based on URIs as namespace identifiers), thus making it necessary to add another indirection step in order to map between those..." [PDF source]

  • [March 08, 2009] "Update on the AIIM CMIS Demo." By Laurence Hart. Word of Pie (Blog).

    "At the end of January [2009], I talked about the proposed effort being undertaken by the iECM committee to create a CMIS demonstration for the AIIM Expo. [See 'AIIM's iECM Committee, Validating CMIS'.] Things are going well and I am working with others to build the demonstration. I wanted to share a few details with you. (1) We are implementing the Web Service binding for CMIS. While REST would be better for what we are doing, it was felt that the Web Services binding would be easier for the development team to churn out. (2) As a result of that, the participating vendors are Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Nuxeo. Microsoft wanted to participate was not sure that their Web Services binding would be complete in time. (3) Each vendor will have a two issues worth of articles from AIIM's bi-monthly publication, Infonomics. In addition, each vendor is welcome to add their own white papers and collateral to the system. (4) Users will search on metadata and/or full text. All searches will be round-robin sorted so that each repository has multiple hits on the first page, assuming that they have any content that meets the criteria. (5) The system is being developed in .NET because we were able to identify a free hosting server that could support the effort. (6) We, including myself, are going to be at the Expo on April 2nd to talk about it. I'll share the exact time when I have it. That is about it. I'll be working and trying to get a basic search up this week. The second step will be performing this in a federated manner against multiple repositories. I'll share the journey as it unfolds. Until then, here is a modified version of the metadata model [Object: AIIMContent... details]

  • [March 08, 2009] "CMIS is Showing Promise." By Malcolm Bliss. From The Crown View (blog).

    "[...] CMIS shows promise of paying off. The JSR 170 and JSR 283 standards have been in development since 2002 and 2005 respectively. They are designed to make application functionality portable across content repositories from different vendors, protect investment in content management applications, to foster an increase in commercially available content management applications, and encourage increasingly lower prices for content management repositories... The experiences from JSR 170 and JSR 283 are reflected in a next generation standard, Content Management Interoperability Services Specification (CMIS). CMIS shows promise because: (1) CMIS reflects the interests of the EMC, IBM, and Microsoft customer bases, and shows promise of winning support from across the community of stakeholders. (2) CMIS is planned to protect existing vendor and user organization investments. CMIS will not require major product changes or significant data model changes. (3) Aggressive standard approval timelines have been set with an objective of initial standard approval by OASIS in 2009. (4) Even though the standard is not yet approved, expectations for product implementations are already being set. For example, IBM has identified CMIS as its plan for integrating its Lotus and enterprise content management products... The CMIS standard is particularly suited for enabling further automation of archiving and legal discovery when the standard is leveraged using an Extract Transform and Load (ETL) utility such as Crown's Buldoser Center. Crown is already adapting the design of Buldoser Center to take advantage of CMIS when EMC, IBM, and Microsoft implementations become available. (Some early CMIS functionality is already available and Crown is using it.) CMIS, in conjunction with Buldoser Center will make it easier to expand the sources that can be addressed with Buldoser Center and expand the advantage that Crown provides to its customers. CMIS is showing promise, and Crown is ready to leverage it..."

  • [March 02, 2009] "Building Content Bridges." By Robert J. Boeri. From EContent Magazine. March 2009 Issue.

    "[...] The scope of the CMIS bridge is intentionally modest to ensure its success. Features common to all systems are supported. Folders, for example, are universal in all systems and, thus, CMIS supports folders. Every system supports versioning, and so does CMIS. Why would arch rival vendors develop the initial standard and then hand it over to OASIS? They wanted to assure the standard's success because each vendor was hearing similar customer complaints: These so-called enterprise repositories were, in fact, islands. That may have been acceptable a generation ago, but that's not so in today's heterogeneous world. And no vendor likes unhappy customers. Better to build a bridge than have customers see your product as a dead end. I asked EMC's David Choy, senior consultant, and Patricia Anderson, senior marketing manager, for some details. Choy said the principals decided to focus on the lowest common denominator ('CRUD') meaning ways to create, retrieve (or read), update, or delete documents. Choy also warned that as difficult as the initial draft of the standard was, taking almost two years to make, getting a final, approved standard through OASIS would probably take at least 18 more months. Product road maps from each vendor might take an additional year. In the meantime, EMC and others will make prototypes available for customers to experiment with. Still, Anderson says the end result will be worth the wait. She says that this standard, the first based on web services, would enable distributed environments such as franchises to share information outside their own organizational boundaries. Companies could even deploy workflows between repositories. Applications built for one system will work with all CMIS-compliant systems. For the first time ever, web-based, service-oriented applications could be developed once to connect multiple ECM systems from the same or different vendors. Systems could connect across intranets and even over the public internet. Day Software also supports CMIS. And given Day's careful adherence to standards, I wanted to get the company's take on this effort. Day's CTO David Nuescheler cautioned that current prototypes are for review only before the standard is finalized..." [Followup: CMIS: EMC's Role and Vision for the Future.]

  • [March 02, 2009] "CMIS Interoperability." By Craig Randall. Blog.

    "CMS Wire recently picked up the development of CMIS Explorer by Shane Johnson at CityTech. CMIS Explorer is a browser application written in Adobe AIR and Flex that uses the RESTful AtomPub binding of the proposed CMIS standard to interact with CMIS-compliant repositories. Already early access support for CMIS is available from EMC, IBM and Alfresco. Such support makes it possible for applications like CMIS Explorer to be applied to a variety of content repositories in ways not possible before CMIS. As fellow OASIS CMIS TC member Florent Guillaume from Nuxeo comments, though, CMIS is not yet a formal (fixed) standard. It is under development and somewhat fluid. When a content repository vendor provides draft support, don't assume that such support fully conforms to the current draft specification (e.g., v0.5). If you're an application developer like Shane, you can know conformance exists by first building against what is specified on the OASIS site for CMIS and then pointing your application at desired content repository or repositories. For example, you can point CMIS Explorer at a Documentum content repository via EMC CMIS support EA2 to search and to see types. However, while basic interoperability seems OK, something prevents actual browsing functionality in CMIS Explorer from working with Documentum. [...] My focus here is simply as follows: It's important for applications to leverage the currently proposed CMIS bindings from OASIS rather than a particular vendor's implementation of these bindings in order to promote interoperability. It will be good to see the emergence of CMIS-based applications that go beyond exploration, navigation and portal-style user experiences. Such applications will help to influence the CMIS roadmap beyond version 1.0. In the meantime, it's great to see open source efforts like CMIS Explorer take root today. Thanks, Shane... It would be good to see a community form around CMIS-based application development (e.g., shine a light on individual efforts, potentially pool interest and resources, solicit ideas and challenges, etc.). If you're interested in something like, please leave me a comment. In the meantime, I plan to promote community efforts here as best I can..." [See also Flex library for interacting with CMIS ATOM services; cmisspaces: CMIS Spaces (Flex+AIR, Flex+Browser) RIA clients for CMIS content management APIs]

  • [February 24, 2009] "Acquia, Alfresco Partner with Optaros for First Drupal CMIS Interface. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Enables Easy Information Sharing Across Drupal and Alfresco Platforms."

    "Optaros (www.Optaros.com), providers of custom, online applications through the Assembled Web, announces the integration of CMIS into the Drupal open source CMS (content management system). Optaros partnered with Acquia (http://acquia.com), commercial support provider for the open source Drupal open source social publishing software, and Alfresco (www.alfresco.com), the open source alternative for enterprise content management, to integrate Alfresco with Drupal using CMIS... Led by Optaros' systems integration team, developers from each company worked together to plan the CMIS integration with Drupal's open source CMS. A collaborative project was housed online through OForge, an Optaros-created shared workspace, where developers could keep each other informed of project status, track code and work out bugs as the project progressed... 'Optaros' solution utilizes the best capabilities of both Alfresco and Drupal, it shows what is possible when open source vendors and solution providers collaborate to create better solutions for customers. Open standards like CMIS will make similar solutions easier to accomplish,' says John Newton, Alfresco Software CTO and co-founder..."

  • [February 23, 2009] "Alfresco Drupal CMIS Integration Available." By Jeff Potts (Optaros). Blog. Similarly in: "Alfresco-Drupal Integration Through CMIS."

    "Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia and Alfresco, has made available a set of Drupal modules that integrates the popular community platform, Drupal, with the leading open source content management repository, Alfresco. We've released the integration as two modules. The first, simply called CMIS API, is a module that knows how to make RESTful CMIS calls to any CMIS-compliant repository and provides Drupal developers with a set of functions to execute those calls. There is nothing vendor-specific in the CMIS API module — it's all based on the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) spec... To do something useful, you need a CMIS-compliant repository... CMIS implementations will have some functions that are specific to each vendor. For example, how authentication is handled is currently vendor-specific. So, we put all of that code in the CMIS Alfresco module. As more and more repositories roll out their CMIS implementations you'll be able to retrieve content from those as well. So the CMIS API module requires one or more CMIS implementation modules, and currently, the CMIS Alfresco module is the only one that exists. As additional repositories become CMIS compliant and people develop implementation modules for those repositories, they'll snap right in. When you put Drupal and Alfresco together, you have something powerful: All of the community features of a Drupal site plus all of the rich content management features of an Alfresco repository... In most organizations, people have more than one content repository and multiple web site technologies. As some people learn the hard way, issuing a top-down edict from IT that dictates the technologies the business must use to build content-centric web apps rarely makes sense. The promise of CMIS is to break the tight coupling between content repositories and the front-end. If every repository in your organization were CMIS enabled, and if every front-end technology could get content out of any CMIS-enabled repository through a simple API call, it wouldn't matter where your content was stored or what front-end technology you wanted to use to get to it. This integration is one step toward that interoperable, open, 'content as a service' ideal..." Related comment by Barb Mosher (CMSWire) and Seth Gottlieb (Content Here Blog).

  • [February 23, 2009] "Drupal and Alfresco." By Dries Buytaert (Acquia) and Chris Fuller (Optaros). Blog.

    "Alfresco and Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia, have made available a set of Drupal modules that integrate Drupal with Alfresco using the CMIS APIs... These modules mark a first step towards enterprise-grade document management support for Drupal — something enterprise users have asked for a lot. What is also cool about this approach is that different Drupal sites can share a single repository of assets. Images and other media assets from one site could be shared with different sub-sites, for example. Futhermore, the CMIS interface, which operates independently of the Alfresco integration, enables your Drupal site to connect with different content repositories. As indicated in a previous blog post, this could be a big deal if enough vendors adopt CMIS. It is still very early and there is plenty of work left to be done. The high level roadmap for the modules is available in the module descriptions on drupal.org. Now that the foundation of the integration is in place, the goal is to improve the work based on customer demand, and if available, with help from the community..." According to Chris Fuller: The CMIS Drupal-Alfresco Integration Project ('CMIS Alfresco') seeks to provide a mechanism to achieve the benefits of Alfresco and Drupal working together via a standards-compliant interface. This is a joint effort between Optaros (Chris Fuller, Jeff Potts), Acquia (Dries Buytaert), and Alfresco. As of 2009-02-18, the module was in an alpha state, and required the CMIS API module, available online. The CMIS API project aims to provide a generic API for integrating with CMIS compliant Enterprise CMS systems. Vendor specific modules, such as the Alfresco CMIS module will use the API to enable content sharing with specific repositories. Developer Release: Execute CMIS API calls against any CMIS-compliant repository; Search a CMIS repository with CMIS Queries; Browse a CMIS repository by navigating its hierarchy; Synchronize nodes between the CMIS repository and Drupal; Autocomplete when specifying folder paths; Specify node options for nodes imported from the CMIS repository; Search Alfresco with OpenSearch. For Future Release: Additional documentation and cleanup; Leverage Single Sign On for authentication; Views integration; Handle file attachments — currently only plain text/html nodes are supported; Better error handling throughout...

  • [February 20, 2009] "ECM: The March to CMIS." By Dick Weisinger (Chief Technologist, Formtek, Inc). Formtek Blog.

    "Late last year the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee was formed, and the first meeting of the Committee was held in late January [2009]. Both Nuxeo and Alfresco have made reports about that first meeting. Estimates are that CMIS would be available as an OASIS standard in late 2009 to early 2010. It seems very encouraging that many vendors appear to be excited about the opportunities that could open once CMIS is realized and achieves acceptance. As one might expect, the target scope for CMIS 1.0 is very basic content management repository functionality — functionality that will be available almost universally by all repositories. A decision was made around what items that are too complex at this point to tackle and include in the 1.0 release of the specification. These include: (1) Records Management Features — including Retention and Hold policies; (2) Tagging: Querying tag inter-relationships, tag change history, building a Tag Cloud. (3) Transactions that span several requests. Access Control Lists (ACLs) of some form are expected to be in the final CMIS spec, but implementations of ACLs across vendors is widely different. ACLs may take some time to come to consensus on..."

  • [February 18, 2009] "JIRA Client for OASIS." By Craig Randall. Blog.

    "Thanks to a recent IT change concerning the OASIS JIRA server, I can now leverage ALM Works JIRA Client to work OASIS CMIS TC issues. Furthermore, all OASIS Issue Trackers in the single OASIS JIRA server are available to me — or any other OASIS member. Here is how: [1] Visit ALM Works and download JIRA Client. [2] Install JIRA Client and choose 'Run JIRA Client' before exiting the installer... Credits: (1) A big thank you to ALM Works founder, Igor Sereda, for his support of open source projects and organizations like OASIS. (2) Thanks also go to Mary McRae of OASIS for gently vetting JIRA Client licensing details, since I'm not an OASIS employee. Just to be clear, this ALM Works software is not being provided by, nor licensed to OASIS as an organization. The JIRA Client license from ALM Works isn't granted to OASIS, but it's restricted to access the OASIS JIRA repository. Each person who installs will need to determine whether or not they are able to accept the licensing agreements for their organization..."

  • [February 12, 2009] "CMIS Explorer: Download." By Shane Johnson (CITYTECH). Blog.

    "I've been working on the CMIS explorer on and off for the past few weeks. I think it is about time I made it available for download. I'd be interesting in hearing feedback on it. The project is now available on Google Code, or you can go straight for the download... I have fixed the code so that there are no more hard coded URLs. It has been tested in both Windows and Ubuntu against both local and remote repositories... CMIS Services/Features finished: (1) Get Repository Info (Display the Repository Properties; Display the Repository Capabilities); (2) Get Types (Display the 'Content' Types); (3) Get Children (Used by the Repository Browser); (4) Create Document (Used by Drag'n Drop - from Desktop to Explorer) (5) Get Content Stream (Used by Drag 'n Drop (from Explorer to Desktop); (6) Query (Used by the Search Form)... Eventually I'd like to get to the remaining services such as those around relationships, allowable actions, and multi-filing. The Repository Browser fully supports multiple drag and drop to/from the desktop and application. Simple select files from the desktop and drag them to the list in the middle where the filenames are displayed for existed files. The new files will then be uploaded the repository and the list will be updated. For the other direction, use control click to select multiple files from the browsed (again from the middle list) and then drag them to the desktop. The files will then be downloaded directly to the desktop... Repository Search: At the moment you have to specify the full query. I'll likely change that so that you simply specify the keyword(s)..." See several comments/followup postings, and see the earlier posting "Flex/AIR, CMIS, and Alfresco."

  • [February 11, 2009] "Content Management Interoperability Services: Unified Search Proposal." Version 0.1. February 09, 2009. 6 pages. Initial Draft. Posted to the CMIS TC List by Gregory Melahn (IBM) on February 11, 2009 (source, reference page). This work is projected to extend through March 15, 2009; see "CMIS Unified Search Design Discussion" below.

    "This document is a proposal for a modification to the draft CMIS specification. The new service described in this proposal will allow search crawlers to navigate a CMIS repository. From the 'Introduction' section: "CMIS has introduced a capability that allows repositories to expose what information inside the repository has changed in an efficient manner for applications of interest, like search crawlers, to leverage to facilitate incremental indexing of a repository. In theory, a search crawler could index the content of a CMIS repository by using the navigation mechanisms already defined as part of the proposed specification. For example, a crawler engine could start at the root collection and, using the REST bindings, progressively navigate through the folders , get the document content and metadata, and index that content. It could use the CMIS date/time stamps to more efficiently do this by querying for documents modified since the last crawl. But there are problems with this approach. First, there is no mechanism for knowing what has been deleted from the repository, so the indexed content would contain 'dead' references. Second, there is no standard way to get the access control information needed to filter the search results so the search consumer only sees the content (s)he is supposed to see. Third, each indexer would solve the crawling of the repository in a different way (for example, one could use query and one could use navigation) causing different performance and scalability characteristics that would be hard to control in such system. Finally, the cost of indexing an entire repository can be prohibitive for large content, or content that changes often, requiring support for incremental crawling and paging results..." See also "CMIS Unified Search Design Discussion" (11-February-2009), posted to the CMIS TC List by Gregory Melahn on February 11, 2009: "[...] Need to ensure that this service, which is really an observation pattern, can be extensible in the future to satisfy other use cases than search. For example, if this were to be applied to audit as well as search, then it would need to also answer who changed the item, why it was changed (e.g., comments), what was changed (specific properties that were changed). Another use case to which this could be applied is replication. Perhaps this could be done by extending the schema in 2.0 to include change details such as that by extending cmisChangedObjectType... A lot of discussion on the need for a way for a service consumer to resume where the consumer left off. One proposal is for a token to be generated by this service that could later be returned to the service as a way for the consumer to tell the provider where to begin to return results. This token would be opaque, verifiable and stable (for some repository-determined specified period of time). Perhaps the token could be also be comparable for before/after comparisons but consensus was that this is not needed..." (source, reference page). Update 2009-03-02: Version 06 (2009-03-02). Update 2009-02-17: CMIS Unified Search Proposal Version 0.3 (results of the 2009-02-17 review meeting) and Gregory Melahn notes (source 0.3, notes).

  • [February 09, 2009] "Answering James McGovern on CMIS." By Laurence Hart. Word of Pie (Blog).

    Back in December 2008, James McGovern asked a few good questions regarding CMIS. I thought I would take a minute to answer them as best I could... Should EMC/Documentum dump their DFS implementation once CMIS support is released? I'm torn here. I believe that CMIS should be 100% supported, but it does not cover everything. There will always be some vendor specific features that will need to be listed. My general thought is that it will not. CMIS will coexist so that changes made to incorporate new features in Documentum will not impact the CMIS implementation which must match the standard... Will CMIS implementations support important security standards such as SAML? Unknown on SAML at this point. I am fairly confident that it is, or has been, under discussion. The presentation that drove the whole security discussion can be found online. They are working to refine the process based upon the meeting and work to be done before the next meeting. As for XACML, it is out and it doesn't appear to have been close. I'm guessing it has to do with simplicity. I got the following note from the Minutes of the First Face-to-Face Meeting: Policies vs. ACLs: We agreed that if we can directly incorporate an ACL model into CMIS, we should consider removing the 'Policy' object entirely for v1... Should CMIS support WS-Transactions? YES! I would expect this to be a subsequent version of the standard and not the 1.0 version. I can see debate on this topic delaying the standard and I would rather see a solid standard released that can the be expanded upon, rather than wait an extra year. This should be in the roadmap for the standard and debate should start as soon as the 1.0 standard is released for comment... The conversation to date has been all about producers: any thoughts on how consumers will embrace? I've been in this conversation on both sides. I recently said good things about Microsoft making SharePoint a consumer of CMIS. This will work great for CEVAs as well, potentially pushing a few players into more expansive roles in the marketplace. Exalead, a participant in the CMIS discussions, is a search vendor, and presumably a consumer. I think that this provides great potential for consumer applications...."

  • [February 05, 2009] "CMIS TC Face-to-face Meeting Notes." From the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC Meeting January 26-28, 2009, held in Redmond, WA, USA. Prepared by CMIS TC Secretary Ethan Gur-esh (Microsoft) 9 pages. Revision 2 (version '3'). See the public posting to the CMIS TC list, and the Kavi reference page.[Source: original, cache/archive]

    F2F Meeting attendees included: Al Brown (IBM), Derek Carr (IBM), David Caruana (Alfresco), David Choy (EMC), Cornelia Davis (EMC), Betsy Fanning (AIIM), Dustin Friesenhahn (Microsoft), Gary Gershon, Paul Goetz (SAP), Florent Guillaume (Nuxeo), Ethan Gur-esh (Microsoft), Dennis Hamilton, Martin Hermes (SAP), Jens Huebel (Open Text), Volker John (Saperion), Stephan Klevenz (SAP), Tony Lee (Amdocs), Ryan McVeigh (Oracle), Greg Melahn (IBM), Pat Miller (Microsoft), Florian Mueller (Open Text), John Newton (Alfresco), David Neuscheler (Day), Conleth O'Connell (Vignette), David Pitfield (Oracle), Norrie Quinn (EMC), Craig Randall (EMC), Julian Reschke (Greenbytes), Steve Roth (Oracle), Patrick Ryan (IBM), and Spencer Shearer (Exalead). Day 1 (January 26, 2008) Use Case Review: Use cases were reviewed/discussed, and questions raised. A set of potential capabilities to add to the spec were identified, and we agreed to discuss them later during the face-to-face meeting... "How did we get here?" ... Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) and Reference Implementations (RI): After discussion, we agreed to the following parameters/next steps for the TC with regards to TCKs and RIs [...] Show and Tell: Apache JackRabbit and CMIS. Day 2 (January 27, 2009): Review REST Issues... Exposing Records Management Metadata: We looked at three possible Records Management-related scenarios for CMIS: [1] Exposing Policy/Retention information: Conclusion: We believe that this would be valuable for existing use cases like e-Discovery, and could be added with minimal burden on existing repositories, e.g., read-only metadata columns that can be defaulted to some form of 'null' if the repository does not have native records management capabilities; [2] Affecting/applying policies and holds; [3] Trying 'what if' retention scenarios, as mandated by the DoD 5015.2 standard, conclusion: This is definitely out-of-scope for CMIS v1.0... Tagging: After an initial review of the scope of Tagging, we don't believe that not enough repositories support tagging natively or consistently enough to include a tagging concept in CMIS... Unified Search: We agreed to consider a proposal for supporting Unified Search in CMIS v1.0... Observation: We don't currently believe that observation could be readily standardized via CMIS, outside of the notion of a Transaction log as described for the Unified Search use case. [...] SOAP Schema Issues. Day 3 (January 28, 2009): Access Control List Proposal: We reviewed this discussion and agreed that we'd like to see an updated version of this proposal with the following parameters [...] Aspect/Mix-in Proposal: The TC reviewed the slides, and we are not clear on whether we actually need mix-ins for CMIS v1.0, or whether the use cases are already covered by concepts in the spec... Hierarchical Properties: We agreed that while CMIS 1.0 will not include hierarchical properties, if group members have guidance/spec proposals they'd like to say regarding namespaces that they believe will help 'future-proof' the spec for the eventual addition of hierarchical properties in a future version, we will consider them... (Summary) Survey of TC membership: What changes MUST/SHOULD we get included in CMIS 1.0. We surveyed the group, and the consensus list of what MUST be done for CMIS version 1.0 of the spec: General bugfix/clean-up based on issues raised; Addition of test cases to the spec to ensure comformance/clarity of implementation; Updating of text style to ISO normative format; Access Control Lists. Things that we SHOULD fix (i.e., we want to fix them, will do so if we have time, but not delay release of the spec for): Unified Search; Extra base metadata fields for Records Management and Digital Asset Management...

  • [February 04, 2009] "Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007." By Trent Swanson (Microsoft Corporation), Bhushan Nene (Microsoft Corporation), and Scot Hillier (SharePoint MVP). From MSDN Library. February 2009. See the companion blog article from "Scot's SharePoint Stuff".

    Summary: "This article shows how to take external repositories (Documentum, Interwoven, etc) and surface them in SharePoint as if they were a document library. The project goes way beyond a few web parts to integrate capabilities such as workflow and custom metadata. There is also a Code Gallery project with the implementation. Although the project is not a full CMIS implementation, it is based on the CMIS specification..." Details: "When developing an information strategy, organizations often begin by considering the structured data found in line-of-business (LOB) systems. Structured data, however, represents less than one third of the total data in an organization. The vast majority of data lives in unstructured documents such as proposals, purchase orders, invoices, employee reviews, and reports. In the enterprise, documents are stored in many different repositories including enterprise content management applications, enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship management systems, product life-cycle management systems, custom LOB applications, and file shares. It can be difficult for information workers who want to use the data contained within these documents to locate the documents and integrate them within their daily work. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an excellent platform for storing, retrieving, and using document-based data within the enterprise... The architecture presented in this article uses the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard for accessing enterprise content management (ECM) systems in a way that is platform-independent. CMIS is a standard developed by Microsoft, the EMC Corporation, and IBM that uses SOAP, Representational State Transfer (REST), and Atom Publishing Protocol to enable communication with and between ECM systems. While the sample is not intended to be a complete example of a CMIS implementation, it can be used as a starting point for such an effort... Accessing the Custom Repository Using WCF Services: The custom repository in the sample is accessed through a set of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. These services implement a portion of the CMIS specification and expose methods for sample operations on the repository. The methods are contained in four services as follows: repository, navigation, object, and versioning. The repository service provides access to functions that apply to the repository as a whole, such as making a connection. The navigation service provides functions for navigating the object hierarchy of the repository to display folders and documents. The object service provides functions for operating on an individual object, such as returning the metadata for an object, uploading, or checking out. The versioning service provides functions for managing the versions of an object. These services provide strong support for the sample, but they are not fully compliant with the CMIS specification. A compliant implementation includes both SOAP and REST endpoints and implements all of the required repository operations. The sample implements only a subset of the available operations. Because the repository uses a custom authentication system, the services and the repository are deployed together as a "self-hosted" WCF service. Self-hosting allows the repository to be deployed as an executable file and to use an authentication scheme that is not based on Windows authentication, by passing credentials along with any method call. This approach enables the custom repository to accurately represent commercial document management systems that use custom security schemes. The sample contains an installer for the host and services. After it is installed, the host can be started and the repository is available...." [Also blogged by Andrew Connell.]

  • [February 02, 2009] "CMIS Meeting Notes." By Florent Guillaume. Nuxeo Blogs.

    "Last week [January 26-29, 2009 was the occasion of] the first face-to-face meeting of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC). This first meeting was very productive, and allowed very constructive discussions. I'll try to retrace below the gist of the conversations around the topics I found most interesting, sometimes these were conversation I had with just one or two people, or topics related to that. The outlook from these discussions, and from the scope of the spec itself, is very positive. I believe that within a year CMIS will start to actively redefine the world of content management systems, which will be an opportunity both for big vendors who will see easier adoption of their solutions by customers concerned by lock-in or interoperability, and for smaller vendors whose products will be able to take advantage of a much broader spectrum of connectors to third-party systems... [Covers: Schedule; Existing Capabilities; Retention and Hold; Tagging; Transactions; Events and Notifications; REST, Reference Implementation/Technology Compatibility Kit; ACLs; Search; Next steps]... ACLs: "Of all the points that really merit further work before a 1.0 version can be considered, ACLs ranked highest — practically everyone agrees that ACLs should be in the spec in some form. However, ACLs are also one of the features that vary most between repositories, so common ground will be hard to find..." Search: "The use cases of Federated Search (an engine that, when queried, delegates the search to many repositories and then aggregates the results) and Unified Search (an engine that somehow crawls many repositories to build a database of what's in them, and can then be directly queried) have been discussed a lot, especially unified search as it impacts a number of other features. One feature needed is something allowing the discovery of permissions, to be able to serve search results without having to check with the repository for each document if access can be granted; this will presumably involve some kind of ACLs. Even if such permission discovery does not reflect the full security policy applicable to a document, it can still be useful to weed out some of the documents and improve the efficiency of the search. Another feature needed is something allowing the discovery of what has changed in the repository since a previous crawl; this can be done either through push/events (but as mentioned above this would be out of scope for CMIS 1.0), or through pull/polling/querying to retrieve some kind of journal of the last changes, including deleted documents; this feature is sometimes called an Event Journal or a Transaction Log, and the problem is to make it available efficiently outside the repository for the benefit of search engines..."

  • [January 30, 2009] "CMIS Update: A Public Review Expected Late Spring." By Barb Mosher. CMSWire.

    "The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee just wrapped up their first face to face meeting at Redmond yesterday... With some insight from Alfresco CTO John Newton, we got an update and help him share that update with you...Throughout the sit down, John Newton twittered about the discussions.,, Highlights of CMIS Technical Committee PowWow: (1) A Use Case Driven Process: The use cases for the CMIS specification haven't really changed - web content management and records management are still out. But they did discuss needing some way to enable developers to at least access information created by applications (like Records Management), so it can be used in new applications. (2) Consensus on Urgency: They all agreed that it was important to get this specification finalized and out the door before the end of 2009, with a public review before the end spring. (3) Security: SAP presented a real world use-case focused on ACLs (Access Control Lists), a new subcommittee has been proposed and agreement is getting closer. (4) REST: Sounds like a good discussion on whether the REST bindings are truly RESTful (remember Roy Fieldings take on this), with a decision to call them something slightly different — maybe RESTful Atom Pub bindings. They also discussed including the WebDAV protocol and decided against it. (5) Reference Implementations: Discussions around the creation of an open Test Compliance Kit (TCK) and the creation of reference implementations, but the focus will continue to be on completion of the reference specification itself. (6) Demos Abounded: More demonstrations including IBM Quickr and CMIS, Day with JackRabbit and Alfresco Share with Joomla and Drupal. (7) Other Issues Discussed: Hierarchical properties, dealing with deal Aspects or Mixins (data type plug-ins) and universal search..."

  • [January 29, 2009] "CMIS Face to Face at Microsoft in Redmond." By John Newton (Alfresco Software). Blog (Content Log: John Newton's thoughts, ideas and opinions on content management, enterprise software and open source).

    Dave Caruana and I just finished participating the in the first Face to Face of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee here in Redmond, WA. Companies participating in person were IBM, Oracle, EMC, Alfresco, Exalead, OpenText, SAP, Day, Nuxeo, Dennis Hamilton (representing himself), and of course, Microsoft. Gary Gershon, Julian Reshke from Greenbytes and Betsy Fanning from AIIM participated by phone... The CMIS effort so far has been use case driven with the main use cases being collaborative content management, integration into portals, mashups and search. There are a number of use cases that explicitly out of scope, such as records management and web content management. Some use cases lie in between where the main application may not be addressed, but we want to allow developers to create applications that may access the information that may be created by other out-of-scope applications. An example that we discussed a lot was records management. We don't want CMIS to be so complex that you can build a records management system, but you may want to access records information for the purposes of eDiscovery... The spec will be ready for public review by the end of Spring. That's a mean feat, but all agreed doable with few obstacles in the way. It also means that the 0.5 spec going into the OASIS process was pretty solid. That doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty to discuss. It was a three day event after all and we used it all up. The most controversial issues were around security and what is truly RESTful. The Security proposal was presented by SAP who have a real need to secure documents consistently with the SAP system. This was an excellent use case and provided a real-world example from which to work and focused on Access Control Lists... David Nuescheler, who is the chair of the JSR-283 committee and CTO of Day Software, presented a couple of discussions in collaboration with Julian Reschke. Julian is also on the WebDAV committee and brings a unique perspective. David presented some of the thoughts that originated with Roy Fielding, also from Day, on whether the REST binding is really RESTful. Although there are arguments to not call the Atom Pub protocol REST bindings, we all felt it was important to communicate our intentions toward REST. In the end, we will call the protocol support RESTful Atom Pub bindings or something like that. David suggested perhaps exploring protocols other than Atom Pub, such as WebDAV. Apparently, these were ruled out quite a while ago and there are already WebDAV standards bodies. Decision is to continue with Atom Pub... IBM showed Quickr accessing CMIS. Day showed a prototype that they are working on that sits on Jackrabbit. Dave showed some new components that we are working on with Share and the Joomla and Drupal integrations with Alfresco using CMIS. Microsoft and EMC had shown their integrations in previous interop sessions... CMIS has momentum. It will be a real specification. We all seem to agree on what we want and what our customers need..."

  • [January 28, 2009] "Flex/AIR, CMIS, and Alfresco." By Shane Johnson (CityTech). Blog. See also the comments.

    "Last week I started building a CMIS browser with Adobe AIR. I have built POCs with Flex before, but that was about it. Then, I downloaded thwirl and I remembered why I like AIR so much. It was easy to install, the UI is nice, and I imagine it was not too difficult to write. This is also a great example of why I like RESTful services too. I believe in the physical separation of the presentation tier, and working with RESTful services is a breeze. So is writing them for that matter. Twitter is a great example of building a social services platform and allowing for the development of third party applications to utilize it. It is a win, win situation. Perhaps 'platform' is the key word there. I'd like to shift from building web applications to building web platforms. So, I decided to build a CMIS browser with AIR... Service - query: I'm a little bit uncertain about having to post XML and use a specific content type in order to search a repository via CMIS. I suppose I'd rather see it done with URL path and query parameters. I'm also wondering if a full blow query language is really in order here. It seems a bit overkill....Hats off to Alfresco for helping bring about CMIS and delivering the first implementation. I've actually worked in an enterprise where SharePoint was used for project collaboration, Alfresco for document management, and Day Communique for web content management. I bet I could have made use of CMIS there if it was around at the time. I found the CMIS specification easy to understand and the Alfresco implementation easy to use. I don't really have any issues with the decision to use ATOM. That being said, (1) JCR: I still hope that one day Alfresco will drop their DM and AVM repositories in favor of a single JCR repository whether it be Jackrabbit or their own. The JCR specification is much more flexible. While Alfresco/CMIS treats everything as a folder or a file, a JCR repository treats everything as a node. (2) JAX-RS: It would be nice if Alfresco would replace web scripts with JAX-RS services whether it be an open source implementation or their own. I'd much rather add some annotations to a POJO than write an XML configuration file, a JS controller, and an FTL template if I just want to return XML/JSON...

  • [January 26, 2009] "AIIM's iECM Committee, Validating CMIS." By Laurence Hart. Word of Pie (Blog).

    AIIM's iECM committee is taking on the creation of a prototype, CMIS-based, system to store the presentation from the 2009 AIIM Expo (March 30 - April 2, 2009, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA). The basic premise is to have one or more CMIS back-end systems storing content with a central interface that would provide content, seamlessly, to users. Rather than explain the details, I'm publishing the official write-up. Before you dive in, if you are a vendor with a CMIS implementation, we want to speak to you... The iECM committee is in the process of evaluating the new Content Management Interoperable Services protocol, which allows CMS integrators and other users to create federated and distributed ECM systems by combining the power of multiple CMS, even those of multiple vendors into a system of systems which makes all the content of those systems available to end users as though they were one system. The members of the iECM committee and the corporations, government agencies, and other organizations that employ and sponsor those members are asking the vendors that are supporting the CMIS effort, and the organizers of the AIIM Expo to cooperate with us, combine our resources to demonstrate the power of ECM in general, and evaluate the usefulness of the proposed CMIS standard. The CMIS demonstration system would be made available prior to the AIIM Expo, and updated with additional related information during and after the event. Access to the content would use the same security mechanisms currently used for allowing AIIM Expo attendees access to the content, the difference being that the content would be more easily found and navigated by using best of breed CMS technologies... The iECM committee is asking: (1) That the AIIM Expo 2009 organizers make available copies of the content discussed above, as it becomes available so that the iECM committee could make populate to AIIM Expo attendees using the same user name/password protections that are currently used for access to this information. (2) That the CMIS vendors supply instances of their ECM/CMS products, and their CMIS implementations (even those that are not yet available to the general CMS community). Preferably ones that are hosted on Internet accessible servers that are under the control of the individual vendors, but that the iECM committee remotely administer and populate, The content would be divided into logical subsets, each to be hosted by one of the distributed CMS systems. The access to the entire collection will be via a CMIS based integration federator, with a web based thin client interface... Contact the iECM Co-Chair Thomas Pole (+1 240-731-7801) or Betsy Fanning (AIIM Standards Director)..."

  • [January 26, 2009] "EMC Documentum CMIS EA2." By Craig Randall. Craig's Musings (Blog: 'Thoughts about software architecture, books and life').

    "Earlier today, the second Early Access (EA2) release of EMC Documentum ECM Platform support for the proposed CMIS standard (i.e., current v0.5 draft) was made publicly available via EDN Labs. EA2 features support for both bindings in the proposed draft standard: SOAP and AtomPub. CMIS EA2 WSDL endpointsare available: http://host:port/services/cmis/service?wsdl, e.g., http://localhost:8080/services/cmis/RepositoryService?wsdl... CMIS EA2 AtomPub service document is available: http://host:port/resources/cmis... CMIS EA2 WADL for the AtomPub resources http://host:port/resources/application.wadl, not covered by the CMIS specification... You'll find more deployment details in the associated guide. EMC is committed to CMIS and the standards process. Just as there was an EA1 before this update, there will be subsequent EA releases in the future. Hopefully by making CMIS support available to you as the proposed standard develops and matures, you will consider exercising the draft bindings and submitting your feedback...

  • [January 26, 2009] "CMIS Apache Jackrabbit Sandbox: Presentation Transcript." By David Nuescheler (Day Software). CMIS Implementations Show and Tell. 26-January-2009. CMIS F2F Meeting, Redmond, WA, USA. PDF version. See the posting to the OASIS CMIS TC List. See the Sandbox CMIS Wiki article and the Jackrabbit mailing lists See PDF (bis).

    "To facilitate the conversation around the CMIS sandbox architecture and goals i quickly put together a little bit of documentation from my perspective and dumped it on the wiki as a starting point. As mentioned before, everybody is invited to participate in the apache jackrabbit project... Slide 3: Introducing the Apache Software Foundation - Non-Profit Organization - Vendor neutral - Open Community - Apache License - IP Clearance Process - (Almost) every vendor is already licensing software from the ASF. Slide 4: Your host is the Jackrabbit PMC: Jackrabbit is an Apache Project. CMIS Sandbox, Hosted in the Apache SVN by the Jackrabbit Project Management Committee (PMC). +2000 Apache committers have commit access. (Probably) all large CMIS TC Members are represented in current committer base. Everybody is invited to contribute and/or use. Slide 5: The Goal: Re-usability for implementors and users . No Strings attached... No proprietary Content Repository dependency. No Framework dependency (servlet). Not even a JCR dependency... Prose from the Wiki: "The CMIS Sandbox at Jackrabbit Based on interest from various Apache Communities the CMIS Sandbox is hosted by the Apache Jackrabbit project and is open to all committers of the ASF. Sumamrizing conversations on the dev mailing list the goal of this effort would be to build a freely available implementation and client of the CMIS specification as it grows. While the CMIS specification is still under development the early implementation will allow to give feedback to the Technical Committee at OASIS to modify and improve the specification. The implementation should not need any Jackrabbit (Content Repository) specific dependencies but should be as portable and reusable for other implementations as possible... [As shown in the diagrams]: "The API represents the Java Language Bindings of the CMIS Model and therefore is used to implement both the CMIS client (that exposes the API) but also the server that allows for plug-able implementation of that... Proposed Server Architecture: The CMIS Server is architected in a fashion that offers a Layered approach. The AtomPub and SOAP bindings are separated by the API. This allows to use both protocol implementations while just having to implement the API on any particular proprietary or standard based server. In Jackrabbit the implementation of the API then will use a standards based JCR binding to avoid and Jackrabbit specific bindings and hence allows to be run on any third party JCR implementation... Proposed Client Architecture: To provide a general purpose CMIS Java client it is important of course provide language bindings of the CMIS Model and then implement the two protocols proposed by CMIS. This will not only be used by Java Application Developers that want to consume CMIS but also can serve as an initial test suite to test any servers interoperability..."

  • [January 17, 2009] "'Delivering' Integrated ECM." By Marko Sillanpää and others. Noted by Craig Randall ("Speaking of CMIS), January 16, 2009: "There's a discussion over at Big Men on Content..."

    "Often one of the hardest things to do in this industry is to explain why an enterprise needs to have one CM application talk to another. The scapegoat answer is to say, because the customer wants it. But most of us know why, without even knowing it. We just don't know how to say it. But waiting for my holiday purchases to arrive it dawned on me, the shipping metaphor... CMIS brings two very interesting opportunities to the mix. First, if customers build their solutions using CMIS, it will allow them to port these applications to other platforms with relative ease. While it may seem that this will only expose a limited set of features to the end user, in fact all traditional library services will be made available in the first release of CMIS. A majority of today's end user solutions can be built using CMIS. As an application begins to outgrow the current CM repository, the solution can be ported to another ECM with relative ease as compared to re-writing to a new platform. Much like using ODBC allows modeling of database applications with platforms like Access or FoxPro. Second, it allows vendors to develop add on components to multiple platforms with relative ease. This will mean more add-on products to the ECM platforms that support CMIS. It also means that vendors looking to develop specialty tools integrated to an ECM platform do not need to bet on a single vendor. Ultimately this will bring customers more options on the types of content that can be managed by an ECM system and how that content can be used within the organization..." Responses by: (1) Pie "CMIS will allow some of those smaller, solid, WCM vendors to keep their applications and allow people to plug it into Documentum or FileNet. This will let them handle all sizes of web presence and allow them to provide the more robust ECM features without having to pick a vendor or lose their focus and edge by developing those features... What I see CMIS doing is relieving the WCM vendors from dealing with the repository, search, workflow, and retention. This will free them up to spend more cycles on the experience of the content creators and making that even better." (2) Lee Dallas "I don't think that CMIS is quite the panacea WCM implementations need. I agree CMIS makes for a better WCM - but many of our problems are not about content CRUD but access to content that has been released to the wild. I am not sure CMIS is how the world should fetch content. So much of WCM is about context that there is always a set of compromises when it comes to assembly and presentation. Content creators need, want and demand that content be managed from the context of the consumer. Pure play WCM products solve for this by creating a tightly coupled relationship between layout and content creation..."

  • [January 17, 2009] "CMIS: Multi-Vendor Proposal for Service Based Content Management Interoperability: EMC's Presentation at SOA World Conference." SYS-CON Webcast. By [SOA World Magazine News Desk and] David Choy and Patricia Anderson.

    "Today's businesses can no longer afford to have essential business content trapped in separate, incompatible repositories. They want an interoperable interface for their repositories that allows them to reuse and share business content easily. In this session at SOA World Conference and Expo 2008 West, EMC's David Choy and Patricia Anderson discussed how to address this need. EMC, IBM, and Microsoft have led the charge together to draft a Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP also collaborated on this work. This draft specification was submitted to OASIS for standardization. CMIS consists of a set of web services that an application can use to query, access, and manipulate content that are stored in a compliant content management system. The specification defines a domain model and two protocol bindings: a SOAP/WSDL binding and a REST/Atom binding..."

  • [December 22, 2008] "Access Control Lists: Proposal for Access Control Lists in CMIS." Version 0.3. 12/18/2008. 37 pages. Edited by Paul Goetz. See the 2008-12-23 posting by David Choy ("Access Control Lists" proposal v0.3 from Paul Goetz, SAP AG), with reference page.

    Document status: "a first proposal; sole purpose is to clarify the wording and outlines the assumptions which are relevant when dealing with ACLs in CMIS." Excerpt: "This draft proposes a specification for policies affecting the object, navigation, versioning, multifiling and discovery services. The repository, relationship and policy services are out-of-scope for this proposal... The CMIS specification defines a generic policy model. This proposal is about Access Control Lists (ACLs) as a specific subset of the policy model. Other options to support ACLs with CMIS are briefly discussed as well... The CMIS 0.5 specification draft introduces a concept of policy objects as part of the specification. The purpose of policies is to restrict access to certain methods of an object to a subset of principals. Policies like other primary entities of the CMIS specification are typed, have an id and have properties. A policy is created using the createPolicy method of the Object Service. Input of this method is a description of the policy (name, type, properties, etc.), output is an ID of the created policy instance. Providing this ID, a policy can be applied to a controllable object (applyPolicy), removed (removePolicy), or retrieved from an object (getAppliedPolicies) via the Policy Service. An controllable object can have zero or more policies applied. Not having a policy applied means that there exist no restrictions in accessing the object... We tried to classify applications and their security requirements in three kinds of scenarios: (1) Collaborative applications, like Collaborative Content Creation, Portals, Mashups, where an end user decides about the permissions to be applied to the documents at runtime; (2) Background tasks, like an archiving application, where a developer has to specify the permissions to be applied at designtime; (3) Business applications, like attaching the scanned images of an invoice to the ERP data, will require application specific security... The requirement is as follows: A developer should be able to work with permissions for CMIS objects in an interoperable manner at designtime — without needing to know what the concrete repository will be at runtime. ACLs imply at least a basic semantic for a policy in terms of 'who is allowed to do what' — in the scenarios [formulated above] the who is known by the application, so this proposal will focus on the what (the permissions)..." [source PDF]

  • [December 22, 2008] "Standards and interoperability for ECM JCR 2, CMIS, etc. Round Table. With Florent Guillaume (Nuxeo) and John Newton (Alfresco). See the 2008-12-22 posting by Florent Guillaume (Head of R&D, Nuxeo), "CMIS Talk at Nuxeo DevDay."

    December 01, 2008 was the first Nuxeo DevDay. We had a round table with John Newton and myself about CMIS and interoperability. The video of this round table discussion has now been published at http://blip.tv/file/1572007/ and the accompanying slides are available directly at http://www.slideshare.net/nuxeo/cmis-round-table-presentation. The rest of the videos and slides for the Nuxeo DevDay are also online. Extract from presentation: The state of JCR: Content Repository for Java; JSR-170, released in June 2005; Initiated by Day Software (also BEA, Documentum, FileNet, IBM, Oracle, Vignette and others); Apache Jackrabbit is the RI. The state of JCR 2: JSR-283, with first public review July 2007; final release expected early 2009; Nuxeo and Alfresco are also contributing. JCR and Problems for ECM: Java API, constrains the storage model a lot, too fine grained for high interoperability. CMIS Goals: Simple document model; independent of protocol; SOAP, REST (AtomPub) bindings; not tied to a programming language; aims to be platform, vendor independent; basic set of ECM functions (greatest common denominator)... CMIS Basics: CRUD (Hierarchy folders, Documents; Simple properties, Lists, One binary), Policies, Versioning, Relationships, SQL Queries... Open Source: More repositories, more clients, more applications, more competition as well!

  • [December 17, 2008] CMIS: Scope of Hierarchical Properties." By Jens Hübel. Initial CMIS TC Wiki entry 'Hierarchical Properties Proposal'.

    This Wiki article summarizes interim results from one of the early CMIS TC discussion topics: the "Scope of Hierarchical Properties." Jens Hübel opened the email list thread with, "Scope of Hierarchical Properties": (excerpt) "To start this discussion I will come up with a list of use cases (A) Dependent Pick Lists. Sometimes properties have a hierarchy between each other. You might have a list of car manufactures on first level and a list of car models on the second level where the allowed elements depend on the value of the first level. (B) Structured documents. Many repositories allow documents not being modeled as something flat but having structure within the document itself. CMIS does support versions as a substructures, other repositories might have additional structures like sub-components, languages, renditions, attachments, whatever. Often repositories allow properties on document level as well as on component level. Some properties might have a global scope (like name, status), whereas other properties might depend on the component level (version-specific, language-specific, attachment specific), e.g., author, modificationDate. The structure is not necessarily restricted to two levels, but can be a tree (e.g., Document-Version-Language-Rendition). (C) Relationship within properties. Some repositories allow properties to be grouped and have a structure in itself. A invoice might have a an ordered list of items, each item having an amount. This is a kind of relationship on property level. The CMIS relationship service might be a way to deal with those situations. (D) Multilingual properties. Perhaps a special form of a hierarchy, but could have some common pattern. Allow a value of a property to be available in more than one language, for example a comment field in English and French..." See the followups by (1) Al Brown; (2) David Choy ["... Regarding 'structured document', it may be a major topic by itself. Some people think of them as content, such as large technical manuals that contain subcomponents. Others think of them to contain metadata, such as forms. And still others argue that content and metadata should be treated the same with no semantic distinction. This discussion may touch upon XML and even XQuery. The TC should decide whether we want to address this for v1.0. In other words, we need to define the scope of 'hierarchical/complex property' if we want to include it in v1.0..."] (3) Julian Reschke ["... Maybe it makes sense to look at how others have dealt with it? JCR doesn't have structured properties per se, but can support complex hierarchies of content nodes. So the structure is not in the properties, but in the tree of nodes they are contained in. This approach is very flexible, and also solves the issue of queryability. On the other hand, it's also hard to implement on top of systems that do not happen to support this in the first place...']; (4) David Nuescheler. And earlier posts by (5) Al Brown: "Another item that may be relevant is hierarchical or complex properties. An example of this would be an address property that contains street, city, state and zip properties..." and (6) Julian Reschke "there's some overlap with current discussions on the Atom Protocol mailing list, such as defining extensions for hierarchical collections. It would be cool if we could avoid inventing this for CMIS, if it's already done somewhere else..." (7) Florent Guillaume [and others]

  • [December 12, 2008] "Interview: Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree Customer and Partner Support Team Leader." JM.Pascal Interviews Philip Arkcoll. Blog: Going to an Open Source ECM World.

    "I am the Product Owner for KnowledgeTree and form the operational part of our product management team... [What do you think about the recent announcement of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification? Do you plan to integrate it in your next release?] Yes, we're excited about the specification and are watching developments closely. Quite a few of our existing customers are larger organizations, who already use a number of other content management solutions across departments. Being able to communicate with what's already there makes a lot of sense to us and provides additional value to our customers. We have already taken a look at the specification and it appears to be close fit to our existing architecture/API. I would say that it's quite likely that we will release a CMIS compliant API at some stage..."

  • [December 11, 2008] "Java Content Repository — JCR." By Cleve Gibbon (CTO, Cognifide). 'Content for the Masses' Blog.

    "In my last post I talked about the recently published Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. A noble and worthwhile specification that enables content applications to access vendor-specific content repositories in a standard way. This is achieved by each vendor exposing their content services through CMIS web-based, service-oriented interfaces. The aim of CMIS is simple - the empowerment content applications. Arm content applications with enough of the common and core services typically attributed to managing content and sit back and see what good things we can make. As a fallback, content applications can always use vendor-specific, proprietary APIs to satisfy low level requirements. However CMIS, pronounced see-miss, is the new kid on the block. Its older brother, JCR, has been around for a while but has had mixed reactions from the CMS community at large. Why is that? [...] If you're seeking a tight integration with a content repository via the JCR, your content application needs to be Java because the JCR is a Content Repository API for Java. You can however interoperate via web services or RESTful APIs, but the communication is much looser in these cases. Moreover, the JCR specification imposes constraints on how you structure your content within the repository. However, that is always going to be the case... when building content applications, its the small things that tend to catch you by surprise. For example, when integrating with Lotus Notes via JCR, a Lotus Notes database is a content repository. However, each email box within Lotus Notes is a separate database. Interesting. So, to write a JCR content application that searches 10 Lotus Notes email boxes requires you to connect to 10 content repositories. This is not really a big deal for a simple, read only search application. However, if you need to move mail between email boxes there is a whole other bunch of stuff you need to take into consideration. You have now entered a different world of challenges. But these challenges are not restricted to the JCR but to CMIS and other vendor-related APIs..."

  • [December 10, 2008] "Alfresco and Joomla Deliver First Integration Based on CMIS Standard. Open Source Content Management Leaders Partner to Offer Alfresco:Joomla! Integration Module." Industry Announcement.

    "Alfresco Software and Joomlatools have announced the first integration based on Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). The Alfresco:Joomla! integration module was built using the draft CMIS REST API to allow organizations running Joomla-based web sites to access Alfresco's robust open source content management repository. Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. The company couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform at much lower cost. Joomla is an award-winning open source web content management system (CMS), which enables organizations to build web sites and powerful online applications. Joomlatools provides consulting services and application development for Joomla. The integration, built using the CMIS REST API, will enable millions of Joomla web sites to access the powerful back-end content repository services of Alfresco, ensuring security, compliance, and auditability. Users will be able to more effectively manage, preview and track increasing volumes of content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla web sites using Alfresco's content library. Similarly Alfresco users will be able to search, publish, share, download, and edit content directly on Joomla sites... Having used both Joomla and Alfresco, Marc Alen from the Belgian Local Police provided the following comment on the integration module: 'We are confident that open-source is a long term solution that allows us to focus on lowering costs, simplicity, flexibility, and increased efficiency. We are looking forward to the integration between Alfresco and Joomla becoming an efficient low cost enterprise solution for document management...'." See "Alfresco Integration using CMIS" and "Joomla, Meet Alfresco."

  • [December 10, 2008] "CMIS Demonstration by Alfresco and Joomla." By Larry Cannell. Burton Group Blog.

    "Alfresco has an interesting online demonstration of a content management integration done in partnership with Joomla. It shows a Joomla website talking with an Alfresco ECM back-end. Users of the Joomla website can walk the folder structure of the Alfresco content. This was done using the draft version of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. What is most interesting to think about is the flexibility this might enable. Either Joomla or Alfresco could be replaced: (1) The Alfresco back-end could be replaced with another CMIS-compliant ECM (without changing code on the Joomla site). (2) The Joomla front-end could be replaced with another CMIS-compliant application or website (without changing code on the Alfresco site). What's missing are details behind authentication between the two systems, which CMIS does not define. Presumably the HTTP channel would be secured using various available methods. Nevertheless, this is impressive and shows how CMIS has the potential to become a major step forward in interoperable content services...."

  • [December 09, 1008] Jackrabbit CMIS Sandbox. Dominique Pfister (Project Lead). The CMIS implementation project in the Jackrabbit sandbox.

    "... [Jukka Zitting wrote: 'How about if I created a new Jira project like JCRCMIS for this?']... Jira projects are cheap so I just went ahead and created the JCRCMIS project. I've given the 'all-developers' group the 'Committer' role in JCRCMIS, so all Apache committers (with a developer role in some Jira project) should have the right to resolve issues and update the project configuration (create new components, etc.). The project is setup like the existing JCR project, for example the notification messages should work the same way. There are two differences though: I've enabled wiki markup for description and comment fields and used the 'no-reopen-closed, patch-avail' workflow scheme. The latter means that there is a nice new 'Patch Available' state for issues and that a closed (as opposed to just resolved) issue can not be reopened (it's better to create a new issue in such cases). Let's see how the wiki markup and workflow settings work in practice. I'd like to start using them in the JCR project as well if the experience from JCRCMIS is good..." See relevant postings from Gabriele Columbro, Dominique Pfister, Paolo Mottadelli, and Jukka Zitting. Related: Apache Jackrabbit: 'jcr-cmis sandbox' and 'jcr-cmis implementation'.

  • [December 6, 2008] "CMIS — Too Good to Miss?" By Cleve Gibbon (CTO, Cognifide). 'Content for the Masses' Blog.

    "... Accessing a document in Office Sharepoint and Documentum, adapting it and ultimately storing it down within IBM FileNet is non-trivial. In short, integrating multiple ECMs is hard. What tends to happen is either: (1) The customer makes do and content remains locked into a single ECM solution, or, (2) The customer invests in intricate (and brittle) solutions that span multiple ECMs. It's a strange position for a customer to be locked out of their own content simply because it is stored in different ECMs. But that's where we are as an industry... The sticky tape, non-collaborative, silo'ed approach to integrating multiple ECMs, is for each provider to 'connect' to other ECM systems. So if your SharePoint implementation needs to view/browse content stored within Documentum and IBM FileNet then two connectors would need to be built to integrate with the respective content repositories. Connectors are integration solutions that erect a tight coupled bridge between two ECMs to enable content to flow from one system to the other... Connectors solve the problem, albeit, in a very narrow and restricted manner. What happens if IBM FileNet customers what to browse a SharePoint content repository? That's a another connector. What if we need to search as well as view/browse content? That's another connector, possibly written by a different third-party company. Suddenly, before you know it, there is a proliferation of connectors, of varying quality, from different vendors, with wide-ranging levels of support, maintenance and release life-cycles. Welcome to the ECM connector marketplace... The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), pronounced See-Miss, is a specification that outlines the core operations of an ECM system. Now it is the responsibility of the vendor to expose their content repository through service-oriented interfaces. CMIS applies the 80/20 rule and purposefully does not attempt to do everything. Instead the CMIS specification focusses on defining a standard domain model and a bunch of key operations for creating, reading, updating, deleting, browsing, and querying content. CMIS is not out to replace your current EMC systems APIs. In truth, you're still going to rely heavily on those. However, CMIS provides a standard language independent way of accessing content stored in different ECMs without the need for third party add-ons... Now the emphasis, read as dream, is for the vendors to implement CMIS services that enable content applications to freely access content within multiple ECMs..."

  • [December 05, 2008] "Vamosa Joins OASIS CMIS Technology Committee." By Barb Mosher. From CMS Wire.

    "... There's a new player at the OASIS CMIS Technology Committee table. Vamosa is a provider of Information Logistics — which basically means they help you with your content in any way possible. From moving, to monitoring, to maintaining and manipulating, Vamosa knows how to make your content work. CMIS will provide structure for how organizations need to make their content available for cross-repository chatter... According to Vamosa CTO, Ijonas Kisselbach, CMIS is a necessary development for the industry. Having a specification like this in place allows customers to focus on the quality of their content and it's reusability and not get mired down in technical integration issues... 'Vamosa has always championed the users of content management systems by developing automated tools and best practice methods to get content in the right format, in the right place at the right time' explains Nic Archer, SVP Solutions at Vamosa. Archer says that with CMIS in place Vamosa can focus their efforts on helping clients with metadata, content and structure updates -- something they 'have always excelled at'. Vamosa says to expect some big news in 2009 regarding the ability to monitor and fix content types in real-time...." See also EContent Magazine and the company notice.

  • [December 05, 2008] [Proposal to] Reconsider HTTP Extensions. Posted by David Nuescheler (Day Software).

    "Based on a number of conversation that I had around the 'rest-binding' I would like to propose that we modify the specification to a degree where we do not extend HTTP if not necessary. Throughout the specification this is mostly practiced through the addition of CMIS- headers. There are a number of issues with that both from a design perspective and from a practical standpoint. From a design standpoint it has to be mentioned that protocols that have a very similar scope to CMIS like WebDAV or AtomPub managed to specify their entire scope without adding HTTP headers (or almost, they got one dubious header each ;), not prefixed though). So one could say that defining custom headers is just bad style, much like fully capitalizing class names in your Java or C# programs. HTTP offers other mechanisms to pass in parameters on an application level, that are much more commonly used. On the other hand there are very practical issues with defining custom headers. There is a lot real-life HTTP infrastructure like Proxies, SSO systems and Firewalls that will strip the unknown CMIS- headers or deny the request completely. Also the simple interaction with a browser through a simple GET request or POST issued by an html-form becomes impossible since the user has no means to influence the headers. I think we would not sacrifice any functionality or feature if we would move the respective headers to somewhere else, intuitively I would say query parameters. This would also make the entire specification much easier to use for an end user..."

  • [November 05, 2008] HTTP and CMIS relationship to WebDAV. By Julian Reschke (Greenbytes GmbH). Posting to the CMIS TC Discussion List. Includes an introduction by the author (JAVA based content management systems and the associated APIs and wire protocols; IETF WebDAV working group; HTTP Working Group - HTTPbis; JCR Expert Group JSR-283; Jackrabbit SPI interfaces and the JCR2SPI implementation).

    "... The first thing I'd like to work on is improving the CMIS text that talks about the relation to WebDAV. In its current state it is (IMHO) in the wrong place (I think the comparison should be made with the HTTP binding, not the model), and lacks some precision. In general, although JCR is an API, and WebDAV a wire protocol, both do define a model as well. Sooner or later, people will want to map between CMIS and those, so I think it's inevitable that mappings will be defined — this could be here, in a JSR, in an open-source project like Jackrabbit, or the IETF. I don't think the place matters a lot, as long as it's done properly. It's some time ago that I read the CMIS base spec, but my first impression was that CMIS is a proper subset of the functionality defined in JCR (maybe except query), and defining a mapping CMIS->JCR should be simple. The other way around however will be harder. It seems to me that it would be good to minimize differences where possible. Similarly, WebDAV has large overlap with CMIS, some stuff CMIS doesn't need (like locking), and some stuff missing (type model). On the other hand, WebDAV is extensible, and WebDAV extensions for remoting JCR will be developed anyway. Furthermore, there's some overlap with current discussions on the Atom Protocol mailing list, such as defining extensions for hierarchical collections. It would be cool if we could avoid inventing this for CMIS, if it's already done somewhere else. In this context it would be great to have somebody with GData (Google Data) knowledge in the TC. Also, I expect that Microsoft's AtomPub experts should be involved as well (or are they here already?). Finally, I'd like to understand whether CMIS is mainly thought as a way to connect document stores, or whether we expect it to be used for client (desktop) integration as well. In the latter case it would be good to understand why we're doing something new, instead of extending WebDAV which already has broad client support..." [Followup from: David Nuescheler, Al Brown]

  • [December 01, 2008] "CMIS: New Open Standard for Content Management Systems — and Quark!" By Jay Nelson (Editorial Director, PlanetQuark.com). PlanetQuark.

    "... Michael Boses, Quark's Director of XML Products (paraphrased): 'Up until now, the companies that make content management systems (CMSes) haven't been pushed to provide interoperability among their systems, so they focused on developing new capabilities within their products instead. The result is that we have a collection of powerful content management systems that are unable to share data, or connect to applications such as QuarkXPress, unless someone builds an 'adaptor' to connect them. And of course, building an adaptor is a complicated, time consuming, and expensive affair. Today's business landscape requires greater interoperability. Most larger companies employ several content management systems in various departments, and in many cases, users of one system cannot search for or access content from another department. Fortunately, three of the major CMS providers are participating in this new standard: IBM, EMC and Microsoft. Others include Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Alfresco, Booz Allen Hamilton, Magnolia, Nuxeo, Open Text, SAP, Saperion, Vamosa, and Vignette. But beyond these larger enterprise users, this kind of interoperability is a huge benefit for producers of dynamic websites — which is just about everybody these days. So, the standard is being driven by not only the folks who sign the Big Checks for enterprise systems, but also by the considerably larger number of companies who require online access to their content. This kind of market pressure will no doubt force the CMS developers to adopt the new standard, or risk losing sales to those who do. Companies such as Quark will benefit from the new standard because they can focus their R&D effort on making a better product, rather than on building adaptors for every CMS system their customers may want to use. Quark has already built 10 adaptors for CMSes to communicate with Quark products...'"

  • [December 01, 2008] "Microsoft, EMC and IBM Create Jointly Developed CMIS Standard." By Jeff Teper (Microsoft Corporate Vice President). Microsoft Interoperability Document.

    "Microsoft has collaborated with EMC, IBM, and leading software vendors Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle, and SAP, on a jointly developed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) solution. The proposed standard is designed to enable communication and interoperability between fragmented content applications. Many companies today deal with multi-vendor, multi-data repositories to conduct their business operations. Information categories such as files, collaboration tools, e-mail systems, instant messaging systems, and databases tend to have their own unique data stores and interfaces. This reduces business flexibility and makes connecting and sharing information difficult. It also requires customers and IT departments to spend valuable time and money to maintain different enterprise content management (ECM) systems within their organizations... The CMIS standard solves this difficult business problem by leveraging existing open protocols including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the web services protocol used by many ECM systems, and Atom, a newer web services model used in many 'Web 2.0' applications. It transforms the way companies share information and manage content across distributed work environments, making it easier to manage and integrate multiple propriety solutions that store business information, like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, EMC Documentum, and IBM FileNet... CMIS demonstrates Microsoft's enhanced support for industry standards and will allow developers and independent software vendors to better interact with existing ECM systems and invent new solutions for customers by introducing a standard set of ECM interoperability interfaces..."

  • [November 24, 2008] "Some Early Thoughts on CMIS." By Alan Pelz-Sharpe (Ovum Analyst). From Intelligent Enterprise and CMS-Watch.

    "... CMIS has caught the imagination of buyers and the industry at large. Yet CMIS (pronounced See-Miss) is still only a specification, not a standard, and — as I talk to buyers, integrators and vendors — I am aware that it is also a poorly understood specification... Probably just because of that word "content," there has been some confusion as to what CMIS targets. CMIS is all about check in/out and the ability to create, read, update and delete a document anywhere. That in fact is the beauty of CMIS, it's simple and has obvious value in larger organizations with multiple legacy systems that are currently hard coded into an ECM central repository (or two)... JSR 170/283's goal is to provide the potential for a virtual repository. It does this by providing an API at the application layer of the stack. CMIS on the other hand provides for interoperability primarily via Web Services at the transportation layer. Two quite different things when you think about it — and with different use cases. I happen to think CMIS will be a success, in part due to it's simplicity and focus. And we need to remember how success will be measured. True success will have nothing to do with the number of vendors who come out with CMIS implementations, rather it will be the number of onsite applications that use CMIS to integrate systems, that will determine success. It is also worth remembering that standards take many years before they really take hold, typically between 5 and 7, so even the most longsighted of us has no real idea as to what the future really holds for CMIS..."

  • [November 21, 2008] Apache Jackrabbit: 'jcr-cmis sandbox' and 'jcr-cmis implementation'. Postings by Julian Reschke and others. Apache Jackrabbit Project List. [Dominique Pfister, Paolo Mottadelli, David Nuescheler, Julian Reschke, Roy Fielding...]

    ['Since functionally the CMIS specification is a subset of the JCR specification it allows a very simple and straight-forward mapping to a fully compliant JCR repository such as Jackrabbit.'] Reschke: "Yes, the more challenging part is the mapping from a JCR repository (how to deal with the information loss). Defining a mapping will be useful, because it could be re-used to define the relation of CMIS and WebDAV. I think the technically most interesting approach would be to enhance WebDAV to carry the information it currently doesn't have (such as node type information), and then to build CMIS as an extension into the Jackrabbit WebDAV layer... Another thing the CMIS TC should look into are the various proposals for including support for hierarchies into AtomPub; see, for example, Hierarchy Extensions to Atom Feeds. It seems to me that this problem is generic enough, and the solution should not be specific to CMIS... [Two thoughts:] (1) At some point of time, we'll have to define a mapping from CMIS to JCR (relatively simple) and the other way around (now that's harder). So, how to map identifiers (types, paths), what to do with the CMIS relation objects and so on. Should we start a design document (a text file) for that, or would a Wiki work better? (2) I think that having a separate connector for CMIS in addition to WebDAV should be avoided. We essentially would mint different HTTP URLs for the same thing. So maybe not now, but at a later point of time it would be good if we could merge the new functionality into the existing WebDAV stack... See above Jackrabbit CMIS Sandbox

  • [November 20, 2008] "CMIS: An Industry Effort to Define a Service-Based Interoperability Standard for Content Management." By Dr. David Choy (EMC Content Management and Archiving CTO Office; also Chair, OASIS CMIS Technical Committee) and Patricia Anderson (EMC Documentum Platform Marketing). 22 pages.

    See the blog article by Craig Randall CMIS at SOA World: "Today my EMC colleagues Dr. David Choy and Patricia Anderson presented CMIS to SOA World attendees, 'An Industry Effort to Define a Service-Based Interoperability Standard for Content Management.' They were kind enough to let me post their work." Source as posted. "Business challenges: (1) Enterprises needed to aggregate/reuse business content trapped in disparate repositories: Different systems deployed in different departments, Systems inherited through business acquisition and merger. (2) Companies needed to get up-to-date information from business partner's repository: E.g. Aircraft maintenance crew needed to access manufacturers' vast manual repository to get the latest spec and procedure to comply with FAA regulation. (3) ISVs wanted a single application code-base that can be deployed in different repository environments: Lower development and maintenance cost, Bigger addressable market... Content Management Interoperability Services is a Web-based, protocol-layer interface to enable application to interoperate with disparate content management systems. It is platform-and language-agnostic, message-based, with loose coupling. Its design goal is providing the ability to support more than one protocol. The specification was drafted by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft in a project started October 2006. Additional collaborators include: Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. Interoperability has been validated by all seven vendors. Benefits of interoperability: (a) Improved user access to content Increases enterprise effectiveness: easier for users to get access to the right information at the right time from their application; (b) Reduces application development costs and grows ISV's addressable market: develop application once to access compliant repositories; (c) Protects customer's investment in applications and repositories: developed applications can run against multiple repositories; (d) Propels ECM industry to the next level of growth: defines a set of standards, technology and interface, that works across multiple vendor and technology providers. There are four kinds of objects: [i] Document: An asset that can have a Content Stream and can be versioned; [ii] Folder: A container for objects; [ii] Relationship: A binary relationship between two objects; [iv] Policy: An administrative policy which can be applied to objects... Run-time security: User authentication is handled by each protocol. Authorization context is exposed through an 'AllowableActions' collection on each object... Once CMIS is ratified, it can accelerate the growth of entire ECM industry..."

  • [November 17, 2008] "Alfresco Launches CMIS Developer Toolbox. Leading Open Source CMIS Member Continues to Grow Community for Content Management Standard." Alfresco Announcement.

    "Alfresco Software has announced the availability of its Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Developer Toolbox. In September 2008, Alfresco released the industry's first CMIS specification draft implementation. The company has now made available the CMIS Developer Toolbox. This includes a working implementation and contains resources to assist developers in the CMIS community to start creating portable content applications, based on the draft specification so that when it is finalized they will be ready on day one. As a contributing member of the draft technical specification, Alfresco is committed to growing the CMIS Community and being the leading Open Source CMIS member — driving development, discussion and adoption of both CMIS and CMIS best practices. In order to encourage developers to learn, explore and prototype CMIS, the Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox provides the following resources (for example): (1) CMIS Trial: a downloadable trial of the draft CMIS implementation; (2) CMIS Sample Dashlets: demonstrating how to use the CMIS REST API; (3) CMIS Wiki: home of all things 'CMIS', including details of the technical specification; (4) CMIS Q&A: covering the top ten most-asked questions about CMIS; (5) CMIS Survey: for developers to provide feedback on their experiences with the CMIS;[...] "CMIS will ultimately enable anyone to develop content applications on open source Alfresco and deploy them on the ECM platform of their choice," said John Newton, Chairman and CTO, Alfresco Software. "Developers can learn, explore and prototype with the draft CMIS specification for themselves, using the Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox and, importantly, contribute their feedback on the developing standard using the online forums and survey. I encourage the ECM Developer community to join the discussion on CMIS and be part of the direction which it takes." The draft CMIS specification is backed by all the leading ECM vendors. The objective of the draft CMIS specification is to deliver a common REST or Web Services API that can be used to develop write-once, run-anywhere, next generation content and social applications..."

  • [November 17, 2008] OASIS Announcement: "OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) as an Open Standard. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Alfresco, Booz Allen Hamilton, EMC, Magnolia, Nuxeo, Open Text, Quark, SAP, Saperion, Vamosa, Vignette, and Others Collaborate to Enable Information Sharing Across Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Repositories."

    "OASIS has formed a new group to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee will advance an open standard that uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within and between companies. Mary Laplante, senior analyst at The Gilbane Group: "CMIS offers new potential for write-once, run-anywhere content. Companies want the best solutions for their business applications. In reality, this means multiple CM systems and the resulting need for integration. Companies still spend significant time and money connecting heterogeneous repositories. CMIS offers the promise of dramatically reduced IT burden associated with maintaining custom integration code and one-off integrations." With CMIS, users do not need unique applications to access each ECM repository. Application development and deployment are much faster and more efficient. The specification provides easy mapping to existing ECM systems. Web technologies, including Web 2.0, Internet scale, service-orientation and resource-orientation, are all exploited in CMIS. According to Al Brown of IBM, convenor of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee: "CMIS will help rapidly grow the industry for both vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs), while protecting customers' investments in applications and repositories. The specification makes it possible to build applications capable of running over a variety of content management systems. This will foster the growth of a true ECM ecosystem and the overall ECM market.'..."

  • [November 13, 2008] "freedom et le futur standard CMIS. freedom sera compatible avec le futur standard CMIS destiné à assurer l'interopérabilité entre les différents systèmes de gestion de contenu." Staff [Mickael Kwasnik], Anakeen Press Release. Complete text in Word .doc format.

    "Le standard CMIS confirme les décisions d'Anakeen, éditeur français de solutions de gestion de contenu pour l'entreprise (ECM). Anakeen annonce que freedom sera compatible avec le futur standard CMIS en se basant sur le draft v0.5 initié par les acteurs du marché de l'ECM , qui collaborent au sein du consotium OASIS. CMIS sera un standard ouvert aux applications de gestion de contenu propriétaire ou libre et leur permettra de 'dialoguer'. Avec ce standard, qui ne fait référence à aucun langage de programmation, les développeurs pourront écrire des applications compatibles avec les référentiels des différents éditeurs, et ainsi permettre aux utilisateurs d'accéder et d'organiser l'information stockée dans différentes application au travers d'une interface unique. L'un des objectifs principaux de la spécification CMIS est de réduire la charge de travail que représente pour les départements informatiques la gestion d'environnements de gestion de contenu multi fournisseurs et multi référentiels. 'CMIS offrira un véritable standard et ira dans le sens que nous avons toujours voulu donner à freedom, c'est-à-dire proposer l'ensemble des informations pertinentes aux utilisateurs sans qu'ils aient à se soucier de son origine', explique Yannick Le Briquer, Président Directeur Général d'Anakeen et ajoute 'CMIS est un sous-ensemble de l'API freedom actuelle, ce qui facilite grandement son implémentation. Le framework freedom est en effet conçu pour permettre de créer des applications métier sur-mesure et de collecter les informations au sein des différents référentiels d'une entreprise, comme son ERP par exemple..."

  • [November 11, 2008] "EMC Updates Documentum for CMIS Standard. Software Compliant With New Enterprise Content Management Standard." By Rosalie Marshall. From vnunet.com.

    Whitney Tidmarsh, EMC world marketing vice president, announced at the firm's Momentum 08 customer and partner event in Prague that EMC has released a version of its Documentum platform which complies with new enterprise content management specifications known collectively as Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). The software is available for customers to download from the EMC Community Network. Tidmarsh said the new Documentum interfaces will address the problems of incompatible repositories... this should reduce the cost of ownership when customers have multiple systems, as well as allowing developers to focus more on value than writing customer code. Razmik Abnous, chief technology officer of EMC's content management and archiving division, said that CMIS defines 'a common object model' and 'a series of bindings'... All the vendors did not try and agree on all enterprise content management (ECM) functionality... CMIS has set specifications for capabilities including search, discovery, library services, content management and Web 2.0 collaboration, but not for functionalities such as transformational services. These will be followed up in the next version of CMIS..."

  • [November 11, 2008] "CMIS Promises Easier Information Sharing." By Michael Osterman (Principal Analyst, Osterman Research.). From Network World.

    "... The basic problem that CMIS is attempting to solve is a serious one. Today, users employ a number of data repositories to do their work: e-mail systems; instant messaging systems; collaboration tools; CRM systems; production databases; and a host of additional tools, each of which typically have their own data stores. Further, most of these systems each have their own interface that IT must deploy and configure, and that end users must learn. This drives up IT and help desk costs and requires users to spend time learning a number of interfaces. What CMIS hopes to achieve is improved productivity by allowing individuals to learn and use a single interface through which they access the various data repositories they need to do their work. The benefits of such an approach include easier access to data for individuals, since they need learn only one interface to access various content repositories; easier deployment for IT because they are managing a more unified system; and less work for application developers who can develop a single interface for accessing all of the repositories that people need to do their work. CMIS is a very good idea and one that should permit organizations and users to become more efficient as the proliferation of content repositories continues to expand..."

  • [November 10, 2008] "EMC to Present at SYS-CON's Virtualization & Cloud Computing Conference." Speaker: Patricia Anderson. From SYS-CON Events.

    "The First International Cloud Computing Conference and Expo will take place on November 19-21, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel, downtown San Jose, California. Today's businesses can no longer afford to have essential business content trapped in separate, incompatible repositories. They want an interoperable interface for their repositories that allows them to reuse and share business content easily. To address this need, EMC, IBM, and Microsoft have led the charge together to draft a Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP also collaborated on this work. This draft specification was recently submitted to OASIS for standardization. CMIS consists of a set of web services that an application can use to query, access, and manipulate content that are stored in a compliant content management system. The specification defines a domain model and two protocol bindings: a SOAP/WSDL binding and a REST/Atom binding..."

  • [November 03, 2008] "Sense/Net Adopts the CMIS Standard — the First in .NET World." By Tamás Bíró. Sense/Net 6.0 DevBlog.

    "We have developed a CMIS draft implementation in Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2, soon to be released. It is possibly the first .NET implementation, as all supporting companies except from Microsoft are JAVA based. It is surely the first open source implementation on the .Net platform... Since Sense/Net 6.0 is both an Enterprise Portal and an Enterprise Content Management System, with its own Content Repository, we wanted to showcase how easy it is to use the .NET platform, WCF and Sense/Net 6.0 to implement the standard [see screenshot]. Our demo is a two way implementation, because our content repository has a CMIS service interface and our portal has a CMIS client Webpart (portlet). So other CMIS clients can access our contents, but our portal can aggregate content from other CMIS compliant systems, such as next generation SharePoint, Alfresco and others. We are also building an online CMIS demo, which is accessible from our website, but is under construction, so it might not work all the time. [Simple CMIS Client, Simple CMIS Aggregate Client] The demo features two CMIS webparts. One is able to navigate the content repository; the other is able to aggregate content from two sources that you can enter. The screenshot above is the CMIS test webpart, showing the PFS root contents. The services can also be accessed, just copy the URI-s from the input boxes. It even works with a simple browser, showing XML. There is no authentication, so no login is required. The source code will be available within a few days..." Related information from the Sense/Net Wiki: "How Does the Implementation of CMIS Work with Sense/Net 6.0?" [See also Sense/Net Enterprise Portal and ECMS from CodePlex, and "Sense/Net Pledges Support for CMIS Standard" from CMS Critic.]

  • [October 29, 2008] "Alfresco Enterprise 3.0 Delivers Collaboration at Dramatically Lower Cost than Proprietary Alternatives." Staff. Alfresco Software Announcement.

    "Alfresco Software, Inc. announced the release of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.0. The latest certified build adds Alfresco Share, a new collaborative content solution, a draft implementation of CMIS specification, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Protocol support to Alfresco's innovative Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform...A draft CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) specification implementation provides users with a platform for developing and testing applications... personal dashlet 'Introducing CMIS: The CMIS Feed dashlet displays links specific to the Alfresco Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification and implementation'... Add Dashlet (CMIS Feed)..." [Note: see earlier Alfresco Offers First Implementation of CMIS in Alfresco Labs 3]

  • [October 23, 2008] IBM CMIS Prototype for FileNet P8 Content Manager 4.0. Al Brown and Jay Brown (IBM). Technology protoptype (alphaWorks). Requires WebSphere Application Server 6.1 or Jetty 6.1.

    "This technology provides support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification that is currently being standardized at OASIS. This prototype provides support for the CMIS REST/Atom binding for the IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager repository. The prototype consists of a CMIS servlet packaged as a WAR (Web Archive) file, a configuration file, and a Web services run-time environment... The prototype uses a servlet container to provide REST services expressed in the CMIS specification. The servlet translates these services at run time to Java API calls to the IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager. These calls are then remotely transferred over either EJB (Enterprise Java Bean) or WSI (Web Service Interface) transport to the P8 Content Manager. The prototype is implemented in Java and uses Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) for the XML serialization and deserialization, and the P8 Java APIs for access to the native repository..."

  • [October 22, 2008] "An ISV's Perspective on CMIS." By Lou Franco. Blog.

    "CMIS is an emerging standard for defining an interface for basic document repository interaction. It is proposed by Microsoft, EMC, and IBM, who with SharePoint, Documentum and FileNet make up a big part of the Enterprise Content Management market... The blog by Chuck Hollis (EMC) gives a compelling case for why ECM customers should care. The third type of player that cares about ECM standards is the company who delivers products that are meant to be added to ECM systems. Atalasoft has been an ECM Imaging ISV for several years with DotImage (our ECM Imaging toolkit). Our customers include ECM vendors, system integrators and consultants who build custom extensions, ECM add-on ISV's who use us to create their add-ons, and ECM customers who use us to write custom extensions themselves. With such a diversity of systems to connect to (many of which use custom or one-off repositories), we usually leave the repository connection to our customers. We provide generic connectors to get to images stored in very common ways, so CMIS offers us an opportunity to extend DotImage to a few more systems. This is nice, but it's hardly a major part of DotImage, and it is not something I see as a major customer request... We could rewrite the parts that CMIS supports, but that's unlikely, because unlike Scan-to-SharePoint, which talks to SharePoint remotely, the viewers are in the process space of SharePoint and the richness of the object model available and the speed is never going to be matched by a web-service based API like CMIS. So while I think the Vizit line will leverage CMIS in some ways -- right now, I think that it will be as a way to extend into the long-tail of CMIS implementors while we still use the proprietary interfaces for the popular ones..."

  • [October 21, 2008] "Forrester Analyst Skeptical About CMIS." By Ron Miller. Blog.

    Being able to move content across repositories, regardless of the vendor, would free content from silos and make it more useful and accessible. So what's not to like? Stephen Powers, an analyst at Forrester Research doesn't deny that [CMIS is] an excellent idea, he just wonders if it will ever see the light of day as a true standard. And if it does become a standard, Powers isn't sure vendors will use it. He's skeptical because he's seen more than one standard come down the pike and, essentially, be ignored. He cites JSR-170, a standard, he says, he almost never hears about when talking to Forrester clients. Powers has a point, but I think that CMIS will succeed where other content management standards have failed because there is such a huge need for this in the marketplace... [Per] John Newton, CTO and Chairman at Alfresco: "The pain of not having a standard has to be big enough for people to overcome their natural tendency to protect their own turf." I think we've reached that point in the market and the need to exchange data is so great that it forced the likes of IBM, Microsoft, EMC and other content management industry giants to sit down at the same table and hash out a draft standard...

  • [October 20, 2008] "Interview: Éric Barroca, Executive VP Operations from Nuxeo." Article also in French. By JM.Pascal. Blog.

    "Today, I'm very proud to have the opportunity to interview Eric Barroca, Executive VP of Operations from Nuxeo. Q: What do you think about the recent announcement of the CMIS specification (Content Management Interoperability Services)? Do you plan to integrate it in the 5.2 roadmap? A: "We're very enthusiastic about this spec and are investing to implement it. You may find our comprehensive reaction... We are warmly welcoming the inception of this future standard and the early feedbacks we are getting from our customers are also very positive. The perspectives are exciting. This is offering a practical solution to real-world and to the endemic Babel-Tower syndrome of heterogeneous information systems. With the growing spread of ECM platforms and related software (search, ERP integration, etc.) in organizations, the interoperability problem and the isolation of content has become a critical issue that our customers are facing. CMIS might be a good answer to this...Technically, CMIS leverages proven and state-of-the-art standards (ATOMPub, HTTP, etc.) and paradigms (REST, SOA), already adopted and heavily leveraged in Nuxeo's open source ECM platform. Our R&D team is already studying the draft and will add the implementation of CMIS into the roadmap our Nuxeo Platform. Beta support should be able before the end of october. Thanks to the power of Nuxeo WebEngine to implement REST-based protocols, the implementation will be straightforward and will also deliver a working UI on top of it..."

  • [October 16, 2008] "Microsoft Partners on ECM Spec. Microsoft, IBM and EMC band together to form the Content Management Interoperability Services specification." By Michael Desmond. From Redmond Developer News.

    [...] The companies plan to submit CMIS to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standards-making body. But some companies are likely to adopt CMIS before ratification — certainly by the end of 2009, says Melissa Webster, program VP for content and digital media technologies at research firm IDC. "I don't think we'll see shops waiting for OASIS ratification," Webster says. "This is going to have a wonderful impact on the ECM marketplace. Finally we have all the leaders in the ECM market signing up to support the same Web-services API." In a September 10, 2008 report, Melissa Webster endorsed the CMIS effort, noting: "CMIS provides a language — and development platform-agnostic standard, one that lets customers leverage their existing expertise in SOAP and REST."...

  • [October 7, 2008] "One on One with David Nüscheler of Day Software." By Ron Miller. Fierce Content Management.

    I interviewed David Nüscheler, CTO at Day Software [and (CMIS TC Proposer]. He knows a thing or two about standards as the Spec-Lead of JSR-170 and JSR-283 and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. I asked Nüscheler to give me his views on CMIS and where it fits in the content management standard landscape. Nüscheler thinks some companies may be putting the cart before the horse when it comes to announcing products for an unapproved standard. [David:] "The CMS market is missing a widely supported protocol specification that would address the communication between applications and a content repository. This is essentially what JCR does for the Java world... CMIS represents a complementary standard to add interoperability between Java- and non-Java based content repositories. Having said that, CMIS is very focused on the requirements of document management--ignoring critical requirements around web content, digital assets and more--and of course there are a number of substantial technical issues with the specification at this stage, some of which has been the subject of much recent discussion on blogs and in the press. Of course, at this stage of any specification, such community discussion is to be expected (and welcome) to help drive a solid spec... [Is CMIS simpler than JCR?] CMIS has a much more limited domain model. It essentially considers everything a document or a folder. This limitation makes it definitely more intuitive for DMS vendors to implement, but because of that focus it is irrelevant (by design) for all the other use cases like WCM, DAM, Social Collaboration, or even Configuration Management hence those amongst other are explicitly excluded from the specification... CMIS is a protocol specification, JCR is a Java specification. Much like for example, the HTTP and the Servlet specification they are complementary. CMIS is really a DM interoperability specification and therefore has a much more limited scope. I think the biggest difference in scope though is that JCR, beyond its interoperability goals, also defines a standard that for content repository infrastructure. This allows application developers to build their applications based on true infrastructure by giving them the flexibility in their domain model but it also allows organizations to consolidate content repository infrastructure..."

  • [October 01, 2008] "De-hyping CMIS." By Craig Randall (TC Proposer). Craig's Musings (Blog).

    "This week has seen REST experts Roy Fielding and Sam Ruby comment on CMIS. As someone directly involved in CMIS, I wanted to acknowledge both Roy's remarks and Sam's remarks, which follow onto Roy's. The standards effort based in OASIS that is CMIS is indeed just getting started, as Sam notes. There is a lot of work to be done, and CMIS needs timely, constructive feedback from the wider community if it is to become widely adopted... the whole point of CMIS is very much intact: interoperability. The details of how interoperability should be achieved are under debate, and this is both expected and healthy. Setting aside the HTTP-is-the-protocol-and-REST-is-an-approach gripe — OK, the documents need some naming tweaks — I still believe that there is value in two bindings for CMIS (i.e., SOAP/RPC and REST/Atom). As I've said elsewhere, both bindings are derived from a common domain model. I believe that this domain model is not the subject of current debate; if it is, I hope that those with concerns will clarify. I do believe that at least the REST binding, as currently specified, has received some fair criticism, and I am confident that the OASIS TC will take all feedback seriously..."

  • [October 01, 2008] CMIS. By Sam Ruby (IBM). From intertwingly (Blog).

    "What matters most to me is [...] whether the operational behavior is such that a pure HTTP client can fully participate up to the limits of the HTTP specification, and AtomPub clients can participate to the limits of the AtomPub specification. By that I mean that extensions are fine, if they are truly optional, e.g., an AtomPub client which is otherwise unaware of CMIS would be able to traverse collections, and fetch, update, and delete resources. Based on my discussion with Al [Brown] last night, I'm cautiously optimistic that this will be the case. I looked at specific instances of service documents and feeds before I came to this conclusion. Furthermore, they were open and responsive to my feedback, and I believe that their invitations for others to participate to be sincere.

    Roy [Fielding]'s point that HTTP headers that affect the representation returned without a VARY header will poison caches is valid, and represents a bug. I'll point out that adding such a VARY header could very well cause caches to be less effective. But, again, I view that as a simple bug, one that the TC intends to address, and one that isn't overly surprising or a cause for concern at this early stage of standardization. Certainly neither HTTP nor AtomPub standardize query, as such I do not see it as a problem if a new media type is introduced for this use case. Perhaps there might be a better way, and if so, it should be pursued, but otherwise a new media type is a perfectly acceptable solution. As I've done with numerous other Atom extensions, I plan to work with this team to add support for CMIS to the Feed Validator...

  • [September 29, 2008] "No REST in CMIS." By Roy T. Fielding. Untangled: Musings of Roy T. Fielding (Blog). With 10 comments as of 2008-10-30.

    "[...] CMIS is a thin veneer on RDBMS-based data repositories that provides a data model for document-like objects within filesystem-like folders, basic file versioning, and access via SQL queries and local object references. It is exactly the kind of document model one would expect within a legacy document management system that is backed by a large relational database and authored via Microsoft Office applications. No surprise, given the sponsors, and there are plenty of good reasons why folks would want to support such data models. For the interface, CMIS includes both a Web Services SOAP/WSDL protocol binding, tightly coupled to the data model, and a REST protocol binding, which also happens to be tightly coupled to the data model... REST is an architectural style, not a protocol, and thus announcing it as a protocol binding is absurdly ignorant behavior for a group of technology companies. The RESTish protocol binding actually being proposed by CMIS is AtomPub, or at least it would be if not for the huge number of unnecessary protocol extensions that tunnel the Web Services interface through fake-Atom and fake-HTTP. The examples assume a single-script gateway that accepts methods in query strings with CMIS-* header fields to bind search scope, just like SOAP envelopes and bodies are used to tunnel object-specific protocols over HTTP. Are there any REST constraints that this binding doesn't violate? [...] CMIS is a classic example of what happens when a control-oriented interface is slapped onto an HTTP-based protocol instead of redesigning the interface to be data-oriented. All of the lowest-common-denominator constraints of CMIS' data model, which are necessary for the SOAP interface because its operations are object-specific, are completely unnecessary for an HTTP interface that is properly designed to be data-oriented..."

  • [September 29, 2008] "CMIS Top Ten Questions: Why CMIS?" By Ian Howells. Blog.

    From the CMIS Top Ten Questions. Why CMIS? In a nutshell: "Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP" is the answer. Standards are of little use if they do not have the support of the major vendors. Theory is great, but code and interoperability talks. Standards stay as theory if they are too difficult, or disruptive for vendors to implement. The ECM industry has been littered with standards that have not been implemented or embraced by the major vendors. Remember ODMA, DMA, JCR? One of the explicit goals of CMIS was that it would not require major product changes or significant data model changes (unlike other standards). CMIS works and has the ability to be a practical standard as was shown at the 'Plugfest'...

  • [September 24, 2008] "Smith and CMIS: A Similar Story." By JM.Pascal. 'Going to an Open Source ECM World' (Blog).

    "I promised to make a small presentation on CMIS ... But currently I have no time to test the first Alfresco implementation of CMIS... But I read the specifications and I follow all the links in my previous post on CMIS. Feel free to take a look regularly. I try to update links when I find others. However, I have to make a special thing to welcome this major initiative in the ECM world. To do this, I made this small presentation..."

  • [September 23, 2008] "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management — 23-September-2008." By Karen M. Shegda, Toby Bell, Kenneth Chin, Mark R. Gilbert, and Mick MacComascaigh. Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00160668.

    Magic Quadrant Players (September 2008): Alfresco, Day Software, EMC, Ever Team, HP, Hyland Software, IBM, Interwoven, Microsoft, Objective Corporation, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Saperion, SunGard Data Systems, Vignette, Xerox, Xythos Software. "Content management is a critical technology that helps organizations manage important documents and other unstructured information, such as photographs, XML components, video clips, podcasts and e-mail messages. Content management vendors address a range of user needs and offer a range of functionality, with some focusing on process-centric applications and others on basic content services (BCS). Enterprise content management (ECM) represents a vision and a framework for implementing a broad range of content management technologies and for extracting higher value from disparate content formats throughout an enterprise. Business planners and IT architects must understand the changing market dynamics and vendor landscape for ECM. ECM vendors must offer a wide range of capabilities that interoperate, but which may also be sold and used as separate products if needed... Integration/Federation Grows in Importance as Organizations Look to Establish an Information-Centric Infrastructure: The ideal ECM architecture would enable one repository, or a few repositories with a common database — but this is not an ideal world. Dealing with multiple, siloed content repositories is a fact of life for many organizations. In Gartner's 2008 survey of nearly 400 respondents, 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories. In many cases, these repositories consist of departmental solutions, and content is often duplicated in other repositories in the organization. Integration of the various content repositories that enterprises have can take several forms. Content management standards do exist, such as Open Document Management API (ODMA), Java Specification Request (JSR) 170, JSR 283 and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV). However, these have been either too narrow or too complex and have achieved limited adoption. For now, the most practical approach involves using custom connectors — application programming interfaces (APIs) — to link one repository to others in order to meet specific needs. Many enterprises also use portals, XML databases and federated search to consolidate access to frequently used content. Federated search and retention management and service-oriented architecture (SOA) will continue to grow in importance as organizations move to federate, rationalize and consolidate their content repositories. In September 2008, EMC, IBM and Microsoft announced they had developed a Web services protocol, Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). This proposed standard governs the exchange of content between ECM repositories and may succeed where others have failed..." See "New Standard Will Make Content Repositories Interoperable."

  • [September 17, 2008] "Vendor Support for Different Elements of CMIS - Updated." By Jed Cawthorne. ECM Stuff (Blog).

    "So, I am currently listening to the AIIM webinar on Collaboration, and the introduction from IBM, the sessions sponsors, noted something I had not picked up on elsewhere — different vendors have promised to support different elements of the CMIS standard, as in how they will implement the standards dual approaches of Web Services, or RESTful programming.. (1) Vendors supporting both Web Services (SOAP etc) and REST: IBM and Alfresco. (2) Vendors supporting Web Services only: SAP, EMC, OpenText. (3) Vendors supporting REST only: Microsoft and BEA Oracle... I asked the IBM representative (Cengiz Satir Sr. Offering Manager IBM Enterprise Content Management) if they would push CMIS forward to get the WCM, RM and DAM issues covered. He responded that CMIS does not / is not meant to cover these complex use cases as its meant for interoperability of 'Basic Content Services'. Now, he should know what he is talking about because as he mentioned IBM has 4 members on the CMIS committee, however its quite a surprising answer to me. Jeetu Patel of Doculabs chipped in with a comment on how broadbased interoperabilty standards initiatives can only ever get more important..."

  • [September 16, 2008] " Content Management Standards Can (Really!) Make It Easier to Manage Data." By Ann All. From IT-BusinessEdge.

    "[CMIS] will employ Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to link heterogeneous systems. Because the standards will allow companies to manage content separately from the repositories in which it is contained, they will no longer require a separate management policy for each repository. The use of Web services will also make it easier for third-party vendors to create specialized applications that can run on top of different ECM systems... A prototype already exists... with OpenText and SAP partnering to use CMIS to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text's ECM software, Enterprise Library Services... CMIS also creates the interesting option of letting companies use content as a service within a service-oriented architecture. Says Richard Anstey, Open Text's vice president of technology and product strategy for ECM Suite: 'We believe records management should be a service that works with other applications that don't necessarily have to manage the records themselves. You want a single place for the policy for how long you keep your records and, if you can expose the records and archives and functionality as a service to be consumed by multiple applications within the enterprise, you're doing yourself a great service...' CMIS will also come in handy if more content management moves into the cloud, as Gartner analyst Mark Gilbert believes it will..."

  • [September 16, 2008] "Microsoft SharePoint and the CMIS Standard." By Shawn Shell. From CMS-Watch.

    "In case you didn't read the blog entry about CMIS by Kas, Microsoft, EMC, and IBM recently announce that they, along with other vendors like Open Text and Alfresco, have submitted a new content integration standard to OASIS. This new standard should enable disparate content management solutions to exchange content in a more standardized way... If history is to teach us anything about Microsoft's behavior, it would seem logical that Redmond will likely release a SharePoint 'accelerator' to take advantage of this new standard. As we've pointed out in the SharePoint Report 2008, SharePoint is not particularly well suited for certain content management functions (e.g,. hardcore document management, document imaging, etc). As such, I suspect that Microsoft may take a similar approach with firms like Open Text and EMC as it has with its other partners: continue to build and support SharePoint's core services and let others figure out how to apply those services in given scenarios... As you probably know, both Open Text and EMC today boast about their SharePoint connectors, providing long-term document retention and archiving, while SharePoint continues to act as the dynamic collaborative space to create those documents. Going forward, with CMIS, this could become more 'out of the box' between SharePoint and other tools, as opposed to a varying bevy of third party add-ons. In the long run, it could potentially eliminate companies like Vorsite from the integration space..."

  • [September 15, 2008] "How CMIS will enable the Aviation Enterprise 2.0." By Joel Amoussou. Blog: Joel Amoussou's Random Thoughts on XML, S1000D, Java EE, SOA, and Aviation Technologies.

    "The recently proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification could play a very important role in ensuring that aircraft operators receive up-to-date maintenance and operation documentation from aerospace manufacturers. The safe and efficient maintenance and operation of air vehicles require clear, technically accurate, and up-to-date technical documentation. The technical documentation is supplied by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), regulatory agencies, and the aircraft operator's own engineering staff... The aerospace industry is in the process of adopting the new S1000D technical publications standard. S1000D is based on the concepts of modularity, reuse, and metadata. However, S1000D alone will not solve all the challenges of modern aerospace data management. While S1000D is the right payload, the exchange between content management and publishing systems within the industry must be orchestrated in an efficient manner... With CMIS, an airline could connect its CMS to the content repositories of its OEM suppliers with a single standardized web services interface based on either SOAP or AtomPub (the RESTful alternative). The massive scalability and popularity of RESTful web services such as the Amazon Web Services and the Google APIs argue in favor of a RESTful approach to aviation technical data management. In general, CMIS will enable new capabilities such as the remote access to library services, cross-repository exchange, cross-repository aggregation, and cross-repository observation (or notification). Demand for these new capabilities will be driven by the emerging distributed aircraft manufacturing model adopted by companies like Boeing, Airbus, and Bombardier Aerospace..."

  • [September 15, 2008] "Introducing the Draft CMIS Implementation." By David Caruana (TC Proposer). From Project Seamist (CMIS) — Alfresco Draft CMIS Implementation.

    Alfresco released Labs 3B on the same day that EMC, IBM and Microsoft announced the publication of CMIS. This was no coincidence. Labs 3B includes the first publicly available and open source implementation of CMIS v0.5 as used in the recent 'Plugfest' where IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, and Alfresco got together to test the interoperability of their servers and clients via CMIS. Alfresco has been a contributing member to the specification for some time. Since the beginning we felt it best to provide feedback and push forward the specification by actually building an implementation against the specification, to test how feasible it is to map to an existing content repository and for developing test clients that support the primary use cases. Within Alfresco, the implementation is known as Project Seamist. We had to use a code name as keeping stuff secret was not easy for an open source company built on transparency! [...]

    The Draft CMIS implementation in Alfresco Labs 3B provides: (1) Support for the CMIS REST and Web Services bindings allowing client applications to connect to, navigate, read, and create content against the Alfresco content repository. The CMIS REST binding is built upon Alfresco's Web Scripts with extensions for Atom / AtomPub. It's a natural fit. It's something we've anticipated for a while. The CMIS Web Services binding is built upon Apache CXF. (2) Support for the CMIS Query Language providing SQL-like querying of the repository including location, properties, and full-text. (3) A CMIS Test Suite to allow compliance compatibility testing against any CMIS compliant REST Binding... This is really just the beginning for CMIS..."

  • [September 14, 2008] "CMIS: Yet Another Acronym or More Than That?" By Apoorv Durga. Blog: Portals & Content Management: News, Views & Analysis.

    "[...] Around the time when JSR 170 was released, I had written that many products have proprietary repositories and it might not be trivial for them to re-architect those to be JCR compliant. This seems to be an important consideration of this spec and thus CMIS is designed to be an abstraction over existing systems. So it does not require the products to make any major changes to their architecture. It does not even try to make it mandatory to expose ALL features via CMIS. There is also a recognition of the fact that many organizations indeed have multiple ECM systems and it is going to remain like that. So it might not be possible for everyone to consider migration and/or consolidation to a common repository... Also there is something that I'm trying to figure out and i'm hoping the experts can point me to something. All the diagrams, including the one here show how this spec aims to improve interoperability among different ECM systems by having an application that can access any CMS. However, doesn't interoperability also mean interaction between the participating CMSs as well - for example, if CMIS enabled EMC Documentum and FileNet are involved and i check out a document in Documentum, the FileNet users will also see that document checked out. Or does this use case not make any sense? We have seen a lot of scenarios where a customer has multiple ECM systems and they want this ability via a common interface..."

  • [September 12, 2008] "Episode 72: The Commoditization of Content Management?" By Mark Lewis (President Content Management and Archiving Division, EMC Corporation). Blog.

    "The CMIS announcement signals the end of an era. Some might say it was an era of proprietary software and ECM applications — just like databases or word processors or even operating systems. What now can happen is that developers and ISVs can begin to develop applications and user interfaces that leverage ECM technology based on a common interface and connect to multiple repositories; in effect, maximizing their market potential. And, ECM suppliers will have more applications that they can run on their platforms just as it happened with databases. This does mean that application developers that have built proprietary content repositories will be at a distinct disadvantage as businesses seek to leverage their information value by integrating repositories and sharing more information across applications. So, if you are running a content-centric application using proprietary repositories that will not support CMIS, over time, it is likely that this application will become more expensive to operate and fall behind in functionality. If you are writing applications and not leveraging open ECM technology, then your applications are likely to become more and more deficient. For everyone else, vendors and customers alike, CMIS is a very good thing..."

  • [September 12, 2008] "CMIS is Great for Magnolia." By Boris Kraft (CEO and President, Magnolia). BetterFasterBigger (Blog).

    "CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) has been proposed by some industry heavyweights (Microsoft, IBM and EMC) as a new standard to exchange information between CM systems. Lars [Trieloff] has written an excellent roundup of what has happened this week with the announcement of a new acronym in the Content Management world. Just as Lars, I was amazed about some of the reactions. If you believe the hype, JSR-170 is dead and CMIS has cured cancer and AIDS in a single stroke of genius. Let me look beyond the hype and ask the simple questions 'what is in it for me'? The outlook for Magnolia and other open-source or 'smaller' (i.e. less pricey) systems is only improved by the ability to access the fat cat's information silos. Systems like Magnolia will bring agility, ease-of-use and cost-effectiveness to developing 'non-strategic' applications against large vendors infrastructure, which somehow sounds more attractive for us than it does for Documentum et al. In any case, if it really happens and really works, it is good for the customer, who finally would get a choice. I for one have reason to look forward to that...

  • [September 12, 2008] "CMIS: I Learned a New Word This Week." By Lars Trieloff (Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management, Day Software). Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog.

    "... one word has been rining in my ears all the time: CMIS. CMIS means Content Management Interoperability Services has been specified by Microsoft, IBM and EMC — and despite its name is based on SOAP and REST. The basic idea is to offer a network protocol (an agreement how to exchange data between computer systems) for content exchange between content repositories and content-centric applications, such as a web content management system, a digital asset management system or a document management system. The standard defines the core concepts like a content repository, document, folder, policy, object type and aspects of these concepts like versioning, operations on objects, etc. Additionally it two protocol bindings, namely SOAP and REST (a 'variant' of the Atom Publishing Protocol has been chosen) two express these concepts. Some confusion has been caused by the question what CMIS is not, which is also important in the definition of a standard. CMIS is not an API, this means developers of content centric applications might use CMIS, but they will never develop against it, they will use a programming library that implements either a CMIS client or a CMIS server framework and this API will be, depending on the exact client library, probably similar to the Java Content Repository API. CMIS does not deal with Administration and Configuration, so there will be no way of adding and removing content types using CMIS. CMIS does not cover Authentication, which means it is left to HTTP in the REST case or WS-Security 1.1 and Username Token Profile 1.1 in case of SOAP..."

  • [September 12, 2008] "Interoperability: Following the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) Announcement by EMC, IBM and Microsoft." By Éric Barroca, Stéfane Fermigier, and Nuxeo Staff. Also available in French.

    "[...] We are warmly welcoming the inception of this future standard and the early feedbacks we are getting from our customers are also very positive. The perspectives are exciting. This is offering a practical solution to real-world and to the endemic Babel-Tower syndrome of heterogeneous information systems... With the growing spread of ECM platforms and related software (search, ERP integration, etc.) in organizations, the interoperability problem and the isolation of content has become a critical issue that our customers are facing. CMIS might be a good answer to this. Technically, CMIS leverages proven and state-of-the-art standards (ATOMPub, HTTP, etc.) and paradigms (REST, SOA), already adopted and heavily leveraged in Nuxeo's open source ECM platform. Our experience of REST pattern for ECM services (through our Nuxeo WebEngine component) and service orientation (Nuxeo Platform has been using OSGi since three years as its core) could bring some nice hints to the creation of version 1.0 of this specifications and therefore we see the choice of the OASIS Group as an umbrella as a good news, given that the work group opens up to other actors. Moreover, Nuxeo could also work and contribute its significant experience to the yet out-of-scope fields such as Records Management and Digital Assets Management. Our R&D team is already studying the draft and will add the implementation of CMIS into the roadmap our Nuxeo Platform. Beta support should be able before the end of october. Thanks to the power of Nuxeo WebEngine to implement REST-based protocols, the implementation will be straightforward and will also deliver a working UI on top of it. As an open source software vendor, Nuxeo's value proposition relies on the widest possible integration of open standards. This lies at the heart of our vision for an ECM platform, designed to fuel the development of an ecosystem (partners, OEM, resellers, ...). This is also key in the decision process of our customers. That's why we're very keen to adopt the CMIS standard : the interoperability path it provides will allow customers to base their technology and solutions choice on their users needs and expectations..."

  • [September 12, 2008] "CMIS: My Take and Link Roundup." By Billy Cripe (Oracle). Blog.

    "[...] Oracle is a member of the CMIS community and helped to review/vet/confirm the spec along with others such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, OpenText, and Alfresco. By now you should have read that it is a Web Services/REST/Atom/SOAP specification for getting at your unstructured content regardless of what content management system it lives in. With the CMIS-defined HTTP calls, standard create, read, update, delete operations against a compliant repository are the same regardless of the vendor repository architecture. If this sounds like JCR (in purpose not API) to you then you're on the right track. But while .Net shops were never going to participate in a java spec, CMIS invites them into the fold. CMIS is the big tent content management specification. Honestly, I like it because, as David Nuescheler point out in the CMS Watch article linked below, '...the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language...' is a good thing. The reality is that many organizations operate in heterogeneous ECM environments. All of us vendors spend cycles on producing system specific components, web parts, adapters, and agents to talk with, store in, migrate from our competitors' systems. This will make that easier. What I don't buy (just yet) is that this proposed standard is all that was missing to allow customers to keep their content just where it is and usher in a new and glorious era of enterprise mashups. The standard provides the common baseline of access/retrieval/interaction with unstructured content and its metadata across the participating ECM systems. You can bet the vendors will start here and differentiate on top. But just the fact that we're all starting here is a very good step in the right direction. Keep in mind that, right now, this is a .5 draft specification so we will see maturation as time goes on and folks sign on..."

  • [September 11, 2008] "CMIS, APP, Zen-SOAP and WS-KitchenSink: Some Data Points." By William Vambenepe (Oracle). Blog.

    "[...] What really caught my attention is how SOAP is used in CMIS. You can hardly tell it's SOAP. CMIS just defines XML messages to be used as payload for requests and responses. You would be excused for forgetting halfway through your implementation that you're supposed to wrap those in a SOAP envelope. Headers are a no-show. The specification says it uses SOAP faults but it actually goes out of its way to avoid the existing elements for fault code and fault message and instead invent its own. The only SOAP feature it really uses is MTOM. Except for the MTOM part, this reminds me of what SOAP was at the beginning of the decade, before any header had been defined (other than those used as illustration in the SOAP specification itself). I want to call it Zen-SOAP, by opposition to the WS-KitchenSink approach in which even simple, synchronous, clear-text, request-response SOAP exchanges somehow get saddled with a half dozen WS-Addressing headers before they've even left the gate...

    They do have a query language, but it is SQL-based, not XPath-based; the query is only used for reads, not for updates. Updates are done through specialized operations (addObjectToFolder, moveObject, updateProperties, createRelationship). This goes beyond not using a generic fine-grained update mechanism. It also goes against using any generic GET/SET operation. The blow reaches all the way to WS-Transfer. For all this, CMIS comes out a much simpler specification and it also frees itself from the web of dependencies (on specifications at different stages of standardization) that has plagued specifications that use WS-Transfer and will plague WS-Federation for using WS-RT..."

  • [September 11, 2008] "CMIS - Will It Be 'Real'?" By Jed Cawthorne. ECM Stuff (Blog).

    "When I was at the Open University we were using EMC Documentum as our heavy duty back end for the 'eProduction System' in other words digital asset management, collaborative team working and workflow for producing all the universities learning materials, be they destined for presentation in print, on the web, as an ebook or as multimedia. One of the 'front ends' for presentation is the Moodle open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). However getting Documentum to talk to Moodle required some development work ('no, you don't say.....') . The developers decided to lever the architecture of JSR 170, the Java Content Repository standard, which as Kas notes above, might have generated some press releases from EMC, but never actually made it as far as Documentum Content Server becoming JCR compliant. Moodle meanwhile is PHP, so there was a PHP to Documentum connector built, using JCR as a 'framework' (basically replicating calls etc). It was 'sort of' successful... Now imagine if both Documentum Content Server and Moodle had been CMIS compliant or had CMIS comliant 'modules' — it would have been sooooo easy...

  • [September 11, 2008] "Content Management Interoperability Services." By Paul Warren. Blog.

    "[...] We are generating content faster now than at any time before and this trend continues a pace. Also legal and regulatory concerns are placing more and more constraints on this content requiring it to be managed ever more intelligently, not to mentioned, requiring it to be discoverable. But everyone knows this and has been attempting to solve the problem for a number of years. Fast forward to the present day and take a look in any typically medium to large enterprise. What you will find is a number of different types of content repository. Each of which was introduced to solve a particular piece of the content management problem; DM, RM, Web Publishing, etc. By and large they solve the problem in their domain but obviosuly each leave us with a silo of information in a repository with yet another interface. This in itself is a big problem. But with each new interface comes another skillset and therefore there is also a not an insignificant cost of ownership attached to each as well. In short we need to start treating our content more strategically. To date there have been quite a few efforts to standardize the ECM space but each has had its Achilles heal and none has really achieved what they set out to do, become the standard. But I am excited about CMIS. It's based on web services and is therefore agnostic to your client architecture. Something that JSR170 fell fowl of. It doesn't really favour WS* or REST, it specifies both, so you can use whichever suits your needs. It is backed by us (i.e. EMC), Microsoft and Oracle as well as Alfresco, OpenText and SAP. It only exposes features already present in these vendor's repositories. So you can have confidence that real implementations of CMIS are imminent and CMIS as a whole will have longevity..."

  • [September 11, 2008] "EMC, IBM, Microsoft aim for content-management interoperability. Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle and SAP join in on the act." By Jon Brodkin. From ComputerWorld UK.

    EMC , IBM and Microsoft have teamed up to develop a specification that will let content management systems from different vendors interact, providing greater flexibility for enterprise customers. Using Web interfaces, a customer might use SAP's front end to access multiple back-end content repositories, archive SAP data in Microsoft SharePoint, or use Microsoft Office or SharePoint to access back-end data inside EMC's Documentum content-management platform. These examples would be made possible by the new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification, which is ready to be submitted to OASIS... The CMIS effort was started two years ago by EMC, IBM and Microsoft, but since then Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP have joined the project. All vendors will be able to use the specification to build Web-service layers on top of existing products, [IBM's] Bisconti says. Current options for integrating ECM systems involve purchasing third-party products, building one-off connectors to allow interoperability in limited scenarios, or manually migrating content from one system to another. Current standards also are not inclusive of all major ECM vendors..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "New Standard Will Make Content Repositories Interoperable." By Kenneth Chin and Mark R. Gilbert. Gartner Research, ID Number: G00161222. Also in PDF format.

    Excerpt: "EMC, IBM and Microsoft have proposed a standard for making enterprise content management repositories interoperable. This standard may succeed where other standards have failed, but it will take time... This proposed standard addresses a key challenge: Over the years, organizations have deployed multiple ECM systems in different departments, and they have accumulated still more systems via mergers. Users can't easily access the content in other systems' repositories. Organizations now have enterprisewide strategies for content management, so the demand for interoperability between repositories has grown. Content management standards such as Open Document Management API (ODMA), Java Specification Request (JSR) 170, JSR 283 and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) have achieved limited adoption. Some of these standards have been too narrow while others have been too complex. Therefore, organizations must use customized adaptors or connectors to federate and consolidate ECM platforms... Gartner believes that the CMIS standard could succeed because: (1) EMC, IBM and Microsoft have demonstrated a strong commitment and leadership. They have worked together on CMIS since October 2006. (2) The contribution of Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP indicates that CMIS will receive wide support among ECM vendors. (3) CMIS takes a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach and uses Web services standards, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and representational state transfer (REST), to provide options for interoperability. ECM products will not incorporate CMIS until at least 2010. Until then, organizations will still need to use custom adaptors and connectors to make ECM systems interoperable. Even after OASIS ratifies CMIS, ECM platforms that are not SOA-enabled will not support the standard. Adoption of CMIS may be slow, and we believe the long time frame leaves a high probability of disruption. ... Organizations with multiple repositories and ECM systems should strongly consider the CMIS standard when it reaches the market; it will help to integrate disparate ECM systems..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "CMIS — It's Not JAS." By Chuck Hollis (EMC). Chuck's Blog

    "... One of the things that I've come to understand about the ECM market is the incredible strategic importance of application developers in this space. Simply put, there are very few out-of-the-box enterprise content management applications: all the useful stuff I've seen is built from various toolsets to solve very specific business requirements. This stuff doesn't build itself. And it's not like sitting down and whipping up a few nice screens for users to see... Hence, in this world, skilled and professional developers are king. And I think that before too long they'll come to see the advantages of creating content management applications that use a portable and re-purposeable metadata standard such as what CMIS brings. Ideally, they'd be able to code once, and move the bulk of their logic and value-add freely between different enterprise content platforms. Much like programmers from another generation learned to love portable code that moved freely between different architectures and operating systems, CMIS might offer the same potential for the growing legion of skilled ECM developers. Sooner or later, this problem is going to have to get solved. One could debate that the proposed standard is imperfect or incomplete in some regard — but, then again, most standards are. The difference here? This problem isn't going away by itself. To me, it's the right standard at the right time...

  • [September 10, 2008] "Content Management Standard Coming. Microsoft, IBM, and EMC Working With Standards Body Oasis to lInk Disparate Content Systems." By Phil Muncaster. From vnunet.com.

    "Several major vendors in the enterprise content management (ECM) space are working together to produce a new industry standard that could dramatically improve the interoperability of proprietary ECM products. Speaking at the annual Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit held by analyst firm Gartner, analyst Mark Gilbert told delegates that Microsoft, IBM and EMC have been working on the new standard for the past year... The content management interoperability standard is being put together partly because the big vendors are finding enterprise customers eschewing their on-premise products precisely because they are creating unmanageable, siloed environments. Gilbert: 'This is one of the most interesting things I've seen in my 15 years as an analyst. It won't be perfect, but it's interesting to see three major rivals working together to allow APIs and programmatic interfaces between their systems.'..."

  • [September 10, 2008] Major ECM Vendors Send Content Sharing Standard to OASIS Today." Ron Miller. From Fierce Content Management. September 10, 2008.

    "... Having multiple ECM systems introduces integration challenges: Enterprises (rightly) want their users to be able to access and manage all content in the way that best meets their needs, regardless of which system it actually live in. For example, users want unified access to all the content they need to work with on their team site, organizations want their electronic discovery applications be able to find content and suspend its disposition across any ECM system. But in practice integrating these ECM systems is a challenge because each has its own interfaces. Even though many capabilities in each system are fundamentally similar (e.g., most ECM systems have a notion of 'check in/out' and version history, and of different Content Types), and most systems' interfaces are 'open' for anyone to integrate with, tying them together requires integration 'connections' for every link between systems... To truly make it simple for ECM systems to interoperate, we need a standard set of ECM interoperability interfaces - that way, every system could support the same interfaces and they could work together without the need for special purpose 'connectors' between each pair of systems. And that's exactly what the CMIS standards effort attempts to define...

    The CMIS specification defines a standard 'domain model' for an ECM system — a set of core concepts that all modern ECM systems have, like Object Types (which in SharePoint we call 'Content Types'), properties, folders, documents, versions, and relationships — and the set of operations that can be performed on those concepts, like navigating through a folder hierarchy, updating a document, etc. CMIS then defines how to bind the CMIS 'domain model' to two different web service protocols: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the web services protocol used by many ECM systems (including SharePoint), and Atom, a newer web services model used in many 'Web 2.0' applications..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "CMIS and Industry Standards in ECM." Kathleen Reidy. The 451 Group Blog.

    "... Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is meant to addresses basic interoperability and accessibility for repository-based content. The goal is to make it easier to pull/push managed content to/from other apps without the need for custom integrations or third-party connectors... The multi-platform / multi-language approach is a must — a Java-only standard would have left SharePoint out of the picture and not covering SharePoint interoperability would seriously hamper the effectiveness of any ECM standard at this point...

    By working at a services layer and utilizing REST and SOAP, layering on top of existing systems and not requiring major re-writes or upgrades will be more feasible and potentially have the quickest impact. This may also limit the sophistication of the what the standard is able to accomplish, but it's better to get some lightweight interoperability with a larger number of existing systems..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS): Another SharePoint Desilofication Solution?" By Andrew Chapman. Blog: ECM, SharePoint, and Compliance.

    "The real question should probably be "Does it stand a snowball in hell's chance of being successful?" Let's face it; we are not exactly short of standards - real, perceived, successful and dismal failures. I suspect that the single biggest indicator to success is not the technical aspects rather it is the fact that it is sponsored by the three biggest players in the market - Microsoft, IBM and EMC, (the 'Axis of ECM')... Theoretically it creates a market with fewer solutions. This is because it reduces the number of vendor-centric requirements so it is possible to build one solution that you can implement on top of any CMIS-compliant repository. The idea is that if each vendor's repository implements the CMIS standard then any CMIS-compliant solution can then communicate with that repository. So if you develop a CMIS compliant document imaging solution you would be able to implement it on top of any CMIS repository. This means that smart people will do exactly that (and make more money) but over time the net number of solutions is reduced... CMIS creates a break in the ECM architecture in to two layers: (1) The content-centric application at the top of the stack. i.e. An image processing system, digital asset management application, business process-centric solution, etc. (2) The repository and the library services at the bottom. i.e. The place where the objects and metadata are stored along with the processes to manage those objects (read, write, version, query, navigate, update, delete, move, etc.)..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "CMIS and Atom/AtomPub." Cornelia Davis (TC Proposer). Weblog.

    "... Atom applicability for content management is a natural. When we started to look at generating bindings for the abstract CMIS model, it was immediately apparent that it was very easy to create Atom Format representations for the core CMIS objects; also, many of the CMIS services deal with sets... we are talking about things that are easily represented as entries and feeds. And from a client perspective, the types of things that we want to do with our corresponding entry and feed representations are similar to what standard Atom clients already do — show the lists of objects and expose some of the attributes for each... The CMIS domain model has a bit more complexity, for example, the notion of hierarchy. Folders (one of the core CMIS object types) can contain other folders as well as documents (another CMIS object type). There are lots of different ways that hierarchies can be represented of course, a flat list with pointers to ids/URIs/keys, etc. What the current CMIS draft does is include children of a folder (folder is represented as an Atom entry) as nested entries. The simple and powerful notion of foreign markup allows for this and there are a number of other ways that CMIS takes advantage of it. The Atom community has talked about nested collections before — CMIS offers an opportunity for a renewed dialog on that subject. Is it proof that entries needn't be nested or is it a catalyst for inclusion?

    AtomPub is where things get really interesting. You'll notice that the REST binding starts off by defining the resource model for CMIS. It defines the folder, document, relationship and policy resources as well as many collections including children (of a particular folder), descendants (of a particular folder — this is where the hierarchy I talked about above comes in), checked out documents (ooh, now things are getting interesting), as so on... As good disciples of Richardson and Ruby we define which of the basic HTTP operations are supported against each. It's pretty straight forward for many of the resources... So what about the very core content management service of checkout? It's tempting to think about the document that we want to check out as the resource that we want to manipulate — but then what operation do we apply? It surely ain't GET or DELETE. PUT is kinda tempting — maybe I can PUT a representation that includes an attribute — true? If someone is really interested, I can dedicate a whole post to why this isn't a good idea but the short of it is that it is generally not a good idea to model semantics such as these with a side effect to some state. So for now, believe me that this PUT approach is not good. What about POST? Well, POSTing is usually reserved for adding entries to collection resources and the document I want to check out isn't a collection. So do we need a new verb: CHECKOUT? Hmmm...

  • [September 10, 2008] "Enter CMIS, a Proposed ECM-SOA Standard." Laurence Hart. Word of Pie: Ponderings on Life, the Universe, and Documentum (Blog).

    "[...] They finally announced an ECM-SOA standard. This new standard, Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), has been submitted to OASIS for approval. This standard was developed by the big three, EMC, Microsoft, and IBM. I like those three. IBM is strong in SOA and a proponent of this architecture as a whole (and it might let their ECM products work together). Microsoft is the popular gorilla in the room and without them, SharePoint would be left out and it would fail. EMC, well, implementing their products has been paying my bills for years. These days, other vendors are helping to pay those bills as well, but EMC still has the lead. Oracle anyone? They were at the table. Also there was Open Text, SAP(!), and everyone's favorite open source ECM vendor, Alfresco (who has an initial implementation already!). These companies all bought into the submission. I would love to know the story of why the three are those three and not four. That is a whole other train of thought and is something for later. The important thing is, just about everybody's list of the top three or four vendors includes the companies in the collaborative seven. This is important if adoption is ever going to happen..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "Alfresco Releases First CMIS Implementation." By John Newton (TC Proposer). Blog.

    "For the ECM industry, this day could prove to be just as momentous. EMC, IBM and Microsoft just announced a new content service interface along with Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP... The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) promises to become the SQL for Content Management. There have been previous attempts to create a universal standard for ECM, but none of them (ODMA, DMA, JCR) got further than a few vendors supporting it. The difference now is that the largest vendors, IBM, Microsoft and EMC have been joined by Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP to not just endorse this specification, but actually create working versions of the protocol... We congratulate EMC, IBM and Microsoft in setting aside their differences to create a common set of interfaces that will create a much bigger market for everyone and solve many customers problems of interoperability. We are proud to be part of the initial submission of this milestone stage in the development of the content management market..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "The Commoditization of Content Management?" By Larry Cannell (Burton Group). Blog

    Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is intended to provide standard methods for accessing content stored in repositories like Documentum, FileNet, or SharePoint. Details of the standard are just coming out. CMIS specifies a Common Domain Model as well as standard bindings for SOAP and REST-based services. The most significant aspect of today's announcement is the size and breadth of the vendors voicing their support of the standard. Alfresco's John Newton blogged his enthusiastic support for CMIS while also announcing the availability of the last release of Alfresco Labs which provides a working demonstration of CMIS via their web scripts capability. Many uses cases for CMIS come to mind. Here are just two I can think of: (1) Content aggregation and mashup. For example, imagine pulling content from multiple repositories and mashing it together in innovative ways, perhaps a visualization based on common metadata or an analytical summary. (2) Content publishing. For example, it may be possible to use a desktop word processor to publish content to any number of repositories without having to load a separate connector for each. Think of this as a new and improved WebDAV... The challenge with assessing these type of announcements is the likelihood we will not see results for quite some time. The only available implementations of CMIS are proofs-of-concepts developed by the vendors for demonstration purposes (even Alfresco Labs is a beta release). The announcement implies that "provider" implementations (code that provides or serves content via CMIS) will be delivered by the vendor (EMC, IBM, Microsoft, and others)... Depending on your situation, other alternatives may suffice (even strengthen) and still others may emerge over time. JCR is very much alive and kicking (and Sling looks intriguing). In addition, methods used by an earlier release of Alfresco Labs, which demonstrated support of the MS-DWSS SharePoint protocol, might also be an alternative to explore. We may yet see other vendors and open source projects learn from Alfresco and support MS-DWSS or other SharePoint protocols which, by the way, has many content providers (SharePoint, soon Alfresco) and consumers (Microsoft Office 2007/2003) already in production deployment...

  • [September 10, 2008] CMIS — Content Management Interoperability Services. By Craig Randall (TC Proposer). Blog: Craig's Musings.

    "EMC, IBM and Microsoft have announced the creation of a jointly developed interface specification called Content Management Interoperability Services, or CMIS. This is important news for the industry as CMIS uses web services to provide greater interoperability across multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories... One of the impacts Kyle sees as a result of CMIS particularly resonates with me: separation of content repositories from content-centric applications in a manner similar to how SQL standardization enabled separation of the relational database from data-centric applications. Entirely new classes of applications (e.g. ERP) emerged with the arrival of SQL, and I'm optimistic about the same kind of potential emergence with the announcement of CMIS. Frankly, I agree with [Kyle McNabb, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research] Kyle's pragmatic assessment of expectation and timeline. I also believe it will take time before we see new classes of content-centric applications emerge, but CMIS is, in my opinion, a step in the right direction... I encourage you to learn more about CMIS on the EMC Developer Network. For example, you can download the complete set of WSDL/XSD documents for the SOAP binding as well as schemas and example XML documents for the REST binding..."

  • [September 10, 2008] ECM Standards War: Bye Bye JSR 170, Hello CMIS! By Bex Huff. Blog.

    "CMS Watch is now reporting the on yet another ECM standard, this one named the Content Management Interoperability Services specification, or CMIS for short. Oracle is a member of the community that is helping design this spec, and I have high hopes for it... unlike the prior ones. I never liked the JCR specs (JSR 170 and JSR 283). Firstly, the world doesn't need a Java based content management spec. That's just plain stupid. Any spec that by design omits SharePoint will be a non-starter. Also, the whole JCR stuff is an API spec. We don't need an API spec: we need a protocol spec. That's where CMIS comes it. Its a REST-ful protocol for getting at your data, and changing individual resources... but it also comes with JSON and SOAP fused in there a bit... cuz frankly, we need the extra oomph. At its heart is the Atom Publishing Protocol. Now... I have some issues with this, because I feel APP isn't robust enough for large scale syndication. There simply is no guarantee of quality of service when you're using 'feeds', and polling-based architectures simply don't scale to thousands of enterprise applications. That's the dirty little secret that ReST fanboys don't want you to find out... Many folks in the open source community have already noticed this, and advocate using the instant messaging protocol XMPP (aka Jabber) to 'wrap' restful web services in a bundle. That's the best of both worlds: a simple protocol that's easy to understand, but with a wrapper that can guarantee your published document actually got to where it was supposed to go... Others advocate that enterprises should use a more proven general-purpose messaging protocol like Apache ActiveMQ, instead of the IM-centric Jabber one..."

  • [September 10, 2008] CMIS: the new Lingua Franca of ECM? By Kas Thomas. TrendWatch Blog.

    "With CMIS (which is superficially quite similar to JCR and Apache Sling), there is no 'J' in the way. Does that mean CMIS will automatically enjoy the sort of uptake JCR never achieved? Of course not. There are many other potential obstacles to adoption, and even if the standard does gain traction, it's always possible for specific implementations to conflict in unexpected ways or be extended in nonstandard directions (as Microsoft tends to do with standards that it initially gets behind, but later hijacks or subverts in some way). A short while before JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler (of Day Software) posted his official reaction on dev.day.com, I asked him what he thought about the seeming collision between JCR (and Sling) and CMIS. His response was that just as the HTTP spec doesn't compete with the Java Servlet spec, JCR does not compete with CMIS. He sees no conflict. In fact, he welcomes the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language. It's a net win for everybody."

  • [September 10, 2008] "DMware: OK, What's CMIS Exactly?" By Dennis Hamilton. Blog.

    "There's a nice flurry of interoperability news today, announcing the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Specification sponsored by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft, with the participation of other content-management vendors, including Open Text. The stratospheric view from Josh Brodkin suggests that CMIS is a means for cross-over between different content-management regimes as well as bridging from content-aware applications to content-management systems. The Sharepoint Team describes CMIS as an adapter and integration model for access from content-aware applications in a CMS-neutral way, relying on distributed services via SOAP, REST, and Atom protocols... It appears that a wide variety of service integrations are possible, although the basic diagram has the familiar shape of an adapter-supported integration on the model of ODBC (and TWAIN and ODMA). Although that's the model, the integration approach is decidedly this-century, relying on relatively-straightforward HTTP-carried protocols rather than client-side integration. Clients must rely on the Service-Oriented Interface, and there is room for provision of client-side adapters to encapsulate that. Either way, this strikes me as timely and very welcome... I thought, at first, that this was some form of off-shoot from the AIIM Interoperable ECM (iECM) Standards Project, yet there is no hint of that in the CMIS materials nor on the iECM project and wiki pages."

  • [September 10, 2008] Dogs and Cats: EMC, Microsoft, IBM, and Alfresco Release CMIS. By Jeff Potts. Blog.

    "[...] What the [CMIS] specification outlines is essentially an abstraction layer between content-centric applications and back-end repositories. The abstraction layer is implemented as a set of services (SOAP-based and REST-based). The services are primarily focused on CRUD functions but they also include a SQL-like query language. Back during my Documentum days, a specification was mentioned called iECM that I thought Documentum and maybe AIIM were working on together. But then it seemed like it kind of died. The goals (and some of the details) sound eerily familiar to CMIS. Could the popularity of more modern content management API's like Alfresco's web scripts and Apache Sling have spurred the legacy vendors into actually doing something about interoperability for real?

  • [September 10, 2008] "Industry Heavy Weights Move to Standardize Enterprise Content Management." By Barb Mosher. Blog.

    "To get the scoop on this draft CMIS, and the background behind its development, CMSWire spoke with executives from the three companies. The entire process to move to a common enterprise content management specification started back in October 2006, when EMC, Microsoft and IBM began a joint plan to propose the first Web Services standards for exchanging content with and between Enterprise CMS systems. Version 0.1 of this specification was completed in July of 2007... Somewhere along the line, they were joined by a few more prominent Enterprise CMS providers including: Open Text, Alfresco (good to see at least one open source CMS vendor in there), Oracle and SAP. This past August [2008], they held a CMIS Interoperability Workshop where they demonstrated prototypes that showed their solutions would work with the specification... To understand why anyone would want a specification like CMIS, you only need look how enterprises use content management systems today. The reality is that many typically have more than one content management solution in house serving any number of departments, teams, divisions, etc. The problem that arises is there is no centralized repository for content, so these enterprises have to look at ways to join this content together. Options that were identified are typical today and include: complete migration to a single CMS, purchase and implementation of one or more off-the-shelf connectors, and federation... [CMIS] is a technical specification — unlike the planned best practice standard for ECM that is in progress between the Content Group and the British Standards Institute. The group felt the development of the best practices specification by The Content Group is complimentary to the work they are doing with the technical specification. EMC is even directly involved in the development of this best practices spec... The specification is designed to exploit web technologies such as Web 2.0, service orientation and resource orientation. The group was also quick to point out that the CMIS specification does not provide standards for design-time or administration operations. Which means that for now, it's a front-end, runtime specification. No word on when — if ever — the specification will grow to include the back-end..."

  • [September 10, 2008] "Standards Deviant No More? Microsoft Embracing Protocols And Partnerships." By Paul McDougall. From InformationWeek.

    "Microsoft said Wednesday that it has teamed with IBM and EMC to create standard specifications for a Web services interface to connect content management systems. Microsoft said that, along with its partners, it plans to submit the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification to the OASIS group for ratification as an industry standard. Microsoft said publication of CMIS would allow content management systems from different vendors to interoperate with each other out of the box. Currently, such interoperability often requires expensive and time-consuming integration work. "Many companies today are struggling with how to unlock the full value of their data when they have multiple-content management solutions,' said IDC analyst Melissa Webster, who called Microsoft's announcement 'a step in the right direction" toward resolving the problem... Microsoft's participation OMG and its alliance with IBM and EMC on Web services interfaces are — in and of themselves — strong indications that the company, long criticized for its proprietary, closed approach to software development, may be changing its ways. Shifting market conditions and regulatory pressures are helping to drive Microsoft's evolution. Enterprise software architectures are becoming more complex. As a result, business IT managers are increasingly loathe to buy from vendors that don't support a wide range of standards and protocols.

  • [September 09, 2008] Announcing the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Specification." By Ethan Gur-esh (Microsoft Program Manager), TC Proposer. Blog.

    "... Having multiple ECM systems introduces integration challenges: Enterprises (rightly) want their users to be able to access and manage all content in the way that best meets their needs, regardless of which system it actually live in. For example, users want unified access to all the content they need to work with on their team site, organizations want their electronic discovery applications be able to find content and suspend its disposition across any ECM system. But in practice integrating these ECM systems is a challenge because each has its own interfaces. Even though many capabilities in each system are fundamentally similar (e.g., most ECM systems have a notion of 'check in/out' and version history, and of different Content Types), and most systems' interfaces are 'open' for anyone to integrate with, tying them together requires integration 'connections' for every link between systems... To truly make it simple for ECM systems to interoperate, we need a standard set of ECM interoperability interfaces - that way, every system could support the same interfaces and they could work together without the need for special purpose 'connectors' between each pair of systems. And that's exactly what the CMIS standards effort attempts to define...

    The CMIS specification defines a standard 'domain model' for an ECM system — a set of core concepts that all modern ECM systems have, like Object Types (which in SharePoint we call 'Content Types'), properties, folders, documents, versions, and relationships — and the set of operations that can be performed on those concepts, like navigating through a folder hierarchy, updating a document, etc. CMIS then defines how to bind the CMIS 'domain model' to two different web service protocols: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the web services protocol used by many ECM systems (including SharePoint), and Atom, a newer web services model used in many 'Web 2.0' applications..."

  • [September 09, 2008] CMIS Standard Announced." By David Ferris. Ferris Research Blog.

    "A new standard to provide for interoperability of content management systems has been launched. It's called 'CMIS', for Content Management Interoperability Services... Thoughts: (1) Much need for such interoperability. (2) This effort deserves industry attention and support. (3) Very good that three leading ECM players are driving this. (4) Probably sound to have initially modest goals. However, this does mean that significant functionality is missing. E.g., work has not yet started on support for categories/tags/taxonomies, and access controls. Category support is very important for e-discovery and archiving applications; and access controls are pretty important for e-discovery, archiving, and compound/virtual documents. (5) This work won't do much to integrate email and non-email repositories (at least at this stage). The data structures are still way too different; CMIS won't address the specific and distinctive attributes of email. Pity..."

  • [August 7, 2008] "Is the Industry Ready for an Official ECM Standard?". Irina Guseva. August 7, 2008.

    "UK-based The Content Group leads the quality standards study for Enterprise Content Management. The Content Group (CG) aims to collaborate with BSI British Standards to develop a best practice standard for ECM, which will establish a frame of reference for the entire ECM market. The final result is expected to be the first ever Publicly Available Specification (PAS) for Enterprise Content Management. A specification for ECM — something that should have been done long ago? Is the content management industry ready for it? With the growing importance of ECM in the business world the desire to establish quality standards in this area is quite understandable. Once completed, the standard will provide definitions and a common understanding of ECM. It will also feature benchmarking and consistent measures for ECM with increased accountability and transparency across the whole information spectrum..."

    [See further: "EI News: Steering Group Responsible for Drafting ECM Standard: "The Content Group has been working actively with BSI British Standards (BSI) to produce the first draft following the announcement of the PAS on 27-September-2007. The Steering Group panelists and the organisations they represent ensures that the PAS will be fully representative of all aspects of ECM. Ben Richmond, founder and CEO of The Content Group comments, 'Unless organisations take a step back from the technology and adopt a best practice approach to defining and implementing an ECM strategy, the potential of this powerful solution set will never be realised. There are four clear steps to achieving ECM success: understand what ECM is, develop a joined up ECM strategy, devise best practice for implementation of that strategy and define a blueprint to measure ongoing organisational ECM effectiveness. This standard will provide a clear frame of reference for those engaging in ECM initiatives'..."]

  • [April, 2008] Information technology — Learning, education and training — Collaborative technology — Collaborative workplace — Part 1: Collaborative workplace data model "ISO/IEC 19778 is applicable to collaborative technologies used to support communication among learners, instructors and other participants. The implementation and communicative use of these technologies entails the creation of information related to participant groups, and to the collaborative environments, functions and tools that are set up for, and used by, these groups. ISO/IEC 19778-1:2008 - together with its subsequent parts - defines data models that enable the portability and reuse of this data in integrated form, and allow Data Model instantiations to be interchanged, stored, retrieved, reused or analysed by a variety of systems. ISO/IEC 19778-1:2008 specifies a table-based approach for defining Data Models. This Data Model specification is used for specifying the collaborative workplace Data Model. The same Data Model specification is also used in ISO/IEC 19778-2 and ISO/IEC 19778-3 to define the related components of the collaborative environment (ISO/IEC 19778-2) and the collaborative group (ISO/IEC 19778-3) in separate Data Models..." Further information from IHS.

    Information technology — Learning, education and training — Collaborative technology — Collaborative workplace — Part 2: Collaborative environment data model "ISO/IEC 19778-2:2008 specifies the Data Model for a collaborative environment. The collaborative environment Data Model composes collaborative tools and declares their collaborative functions by specifying their names. These names may be used as references to collaborative tools and collaborative functions specified in detail by further specifications or standards. Where no such specifications or standards are available or identified, the provision of descriptions for human interpretation may support harmonized use of these names..."

    Information technology — Learning, education and training — Collaborative technology — Collaborative workplace — Part 3: Collaborative group data model "ISO/IEC 19778-3:2008 specifies the Data Model for a collaborative group. The collaborative group Data Model composes roles which can be played by the participants of a collaborative group, declares the intended role holders (positions for playing a particular role) for each role, and (at least during the life-span of the collaborative workplace) assigns participants to these role holders. The role names may be used as references to roles specified in detail by further specifications or standards. Where no such specifications or standards are available or identified, the provision of descriptions for human interpretation may support harmonized use of these names. Provided participant identifiers may be used as references to detailed participant information which may be specified in a provided user management system..."

  • [June 24, 2007] "Lack of ECM Standards and how it hurts many..." By James McGovern. Blog.

    Laurence Hart had written:

    "The basic problem is that when I talk to other people in the ECM world, standards never comes up. It is almost irrelevant. Well, standards that are so ingrained that we never talk about them is a great goal, but we are on the other side of the mountain. We have yet to define and implement any standards in such a way that we can take them from granted and do more real work and less scut-work. There are a few reasons for this, one being the shifting of technology. Anyone remember ODMA? [...] standards isn't sexy and cool in the ECM world yet... EMC is involved in the standards process. They are part of the expert group for the Java Content Repository 1.0 (JSR-170) and the early draft state of the JCP 2.0 version (JSR-283). Not much of a take-away. It is nice to know that Cornelia, one of their leading technologists, truly cares about standards, but I think the enablement of SOA using Documentum Foundation Services is as close as we are going to get for a few years... Let's face it, until there is an actual standard that isn't going to be replaced in a couple of years, how can we expect EMC or any other leading vendor to implement standards? We need an upstart company, or a determined user community, to force the established vendors to implement standards."

    McGovern: "If you think it is about an upstart company then we are already off to a bad start. I would consider Alfresco an upstart yet they haven't even attempted to champion any form of standards in their domain. They are probably focused more on survival which says that you spend your money on things like sales folks instead of developers working with standards bodies. Could we at least acknowledge that ECM isn't a standalone domain and that other domains such as CRM, BPM, ESB, and ERP may also need to integrate? If a vendor were to stop paying attention to all those little trees and noticed that the forest is quite big, they may have the opportunity to sell even more of their product. Ask yourself, do you believe if Alfreso where the first vendor to have integration with Salesforce.com via sforce APIs that they could generate additional buzz which could turn into sales? If Alfresco where to pay attention to security requirements, could they become a strong contender in the enterprise space for e-discovery compliance?"
Hosted By
OASIS - Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards

Sponsored By

IBM Corporation
ISIS Papyrus
Microsoft Corporation
Oracle Corporation

Primeton

XML Daily Newslink
Receive daily news updates from Managing Editor, Robin Cover.

 Newsletter Subscription
 Newsletter Archives
Globe Image

Document URI: http://xml.coverpages.org/cmis.html  —  Legal stuff
Robin Cover, Editor: robin@oasis-open.org