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Created: September 10, 2008.
News: Cover StoriesPrevious News ItemNext News Item

Vendors Publish Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard.

Note: See now complete references in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

Contents

Enterprise Content Management vendors EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation have 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. 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...."

CMIS Resources from the Vendor Companies

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

References (in part):

Blogs and Commentary

[TBD]

  • Announcing the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Specification." By Ethan Gur-esh (Microsoft Program Manager). 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' & 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..."

  • 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' & 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..."

  • "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..."

  • "CMIS and Atom/AtomPub." Cornelia Davis. 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...

  • "Enter CMIS, a Proposed ECM-SOA Standard." Laurence Hart. Blog.

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

  • "Alfresco Releases First CMIS implementation." By John Newton. Blog.

  • The Commoditization of Content Management? By Larry Cannell (Burton Group).

  • CMIS - Content Management Interoperability Services. By Craig Randall. Blog: Craig's Musings.

  • ECM Standards War: Bye Bye JSR170, Hello CMIS!

  • CMIS: the new Lingua Franca of ECM? TrendWatch Blog.

  • Dogs and Cats: EMC, Microsoft, IBM, and Alfresco Release CMIS. By Jeff Potts. Blog.

  • "Industry Heavy Weights Move to Standardize Enterprise Content Management." By Barb Mosher. Blog.

  • "Is the Industry Ready for an Official ECM Standard?". Irina Guseva. August 7, 2008. "... BSI to produce 'the first ever Publicly Available Specification (PAS) for Enterprise Content Management'.

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

  • "Standards Deviant No More? Microsoft Embracing Protocols And Partnerships." Paul McDougall. From InformationWeek.

Draft Charter for Proposed OASIS CMIS Technical Committee

OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC home page

From the Proposed Charter for OASIS CMIS Technical Committee:

CMIS Proposed Charter Contents

1A. Name of the TC

OASIS 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 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 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

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

  • Workflow and 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 and Compliance
  • Digital Asset Management
  • Web Content Management
  • 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 JCR (JSR-170, JSR-283), WebDAV, and other relevant standards
  • To define appropriate specifications for interoperable content management:
    • Including schemas, such as XSD
    • Including service definitions, such as WSDL
  • To standardize the common types of entities and capabilities in CM
  • To encourage cooperation within and between the various topical domains and groups

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.

After the first set of deliverables, the TC will continue to work on the next versions of the specification. The next versions can address new or refine existing use cases by extending the domain model as well as defining new bindings as appropriate to support Interoperable Content Management.

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 application architects and ECM repository architects and implementers.

1G. Language

The language in which the TC shall conduct business: English

Section 2: Non-normative Information

2A. Other 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 EDT/9AM PDT, 11/10/2008, conference call hosted by EMC

2C. 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 3 times a year for three days starting: 1/19/2009 (Redmond, Washington, hosted by Ethan Gur-esh, Microsoft)

2D. Proposers

Names, electronic mail addresses, and membership affiliations of at least Minimum Membership:

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

Input Specifications are available at:

http://community.emc.com/community/labs/cmis
http://www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/cm-interoperablity-services.html
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/ecm/cmis.mspx

2I. Proposed Specification Titles

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

CFP source:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200809/msg00006.html
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/members/200809/msg00003.html
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oasis-charter-discuss/200809/msg00014.html

Principal References

NB: Most URI references from the news story are not duplicated here. See above especially in the sections CMIS Resources from the Vendor Companies and CMIS: Blogs and Commentary.


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