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

Contents

• Summary
• Bibliographic Information: CMIS Version 0.5
• Vendor Company Announcements for CMIS
  • EMC, IBM, Microsoft Joint Announcement
  • Alfresco Announcement
  • Open Text Announcement
• CMIS Overview: Vendor Statements
  • IBM
  • Microsoft
  • Alfresco
  • EMC
• CMIS Resources from the Vendor Companies
• CMIS: Blogs and Commentary
• OASIS CMIS Technical Committee
• Principal References

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:

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:

• Alfresco: http://www.alfresco.com/about/cmis/cmis-draft-v0.5.zip
• EMC: http://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-1605
• IBM: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/data/ECM/content/cmis.zip
• Microsoft: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=127855

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.

CMIS Overview: Vendor Statements

CMIS Resources from the Vendor Companies

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

• Alfresco
• EMC
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Open Text
• Oracle
• SAP

References (in part):

• Alfresco

  • Project Seamist: The Alfresco Draft CMIS Implementation available via Alfresco Labs.
  • Announcement: "Alfresco Provides First Draft CMIS Implementation via Alfresco Labs. Allows Companies to Gain Hands-On Experience with Proposed Content Management Standard."
  • "Alfresco Releases First CMIS implementation." By John Newton. Alfresco Blog.
  • Alfresco Labs 3. The Alfresco Labs 3 B release includes a Draft CMIS Implementation.
  • Alfresco Labs 3 Download. Install Labs 3 B to test drive the Draft CMIS implementation
  • Alfresco Developer CMIS Forum. Use this forum to discuss the Draft Implementation or CMIS in general.
  • Alfresco Enterprise Content Management
  • Alfresco web site. "Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM)."

• EMC

  • EMC CMIS Reference Page
  • EMC CMIS Press Release [PDF]
  • Press release and photos
  • Download CMIS Version v0.5
  • White Paper. "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). Defining Web Services for Sharing Information Among Disparate Repositories."
  • CMIS Solution Overview
  • CMIS Diagram
  • Videos on CMIS:
    • Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). Razmik Abnous.
    • CMIS Technical Overview, Part 1. By David Choy. Introduction to the technology behing CMIS.
    • CMIS Technical Overview, Part 2. By David Choy.
    • CMIS Application Scenarios. Jignesh Shah talks about how CMIS is applied to applications.
  • EMC web site

• IBM

  • Announcement: "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 (CMIS) Specification."
  • Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Information Management Software. Extending Business Content Services.
  • Harnessing value from and controlling casually created and shared content." Business content services and strategy from IBM.
  • CMIS Specification Download
  • IBM: Enterprise Content Management
  • FileNet Connectors for Microsoft SharePoint
  • IBM web site

• Microsoft

  • Announcement September 10, 2008: EMC, IBM and Microsoft Jointly Create First Web Services Interface Specification for Greater Interoperability of Enterprise Content Management Systems.
  • Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) proposed standard announced. From Michael O'Donovan's SharePoint and Stuff Blog.
  • Download CMIS specification v0.5
  • Announcing the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. By Ethan Gur-esh.
  • Video about the CMIS Specification. Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for Office Business Platform at Microsoft, discusses the CMIS Specification and Microsoft's commitment to interoperability in enterprise content management. (03:11) Available as .WMV or .MPG.
  • Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Virtual Pressroom
  • Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
  • Standards at Microsoft
  • Feature Story: Microsoft Interoperability Principles Statement. February 21, 2008 or later.
  • Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability
  • Microsoft web site

• Open Text

  • Open Text Pledges Support for New Content Management Interoperability Services Standard. September 10, 2008.
  • Open Text web site

• Oracle [TBD]

  • Oracle web site

• SAP [TBD]

  • SAP web site

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

• Proposed Charter for Review and Comment
  • 1A. Name of the TC
  • 1B. Statement of Purpose
  • 1C. Scope of Work
  • 1D. List of Deliverables
  • 1E. IPR Mode
  • 1F. Audience for the TC
  • 1G. Language
• Section 2: Non-normative Information
  • 2A. Other Work
  • 2B First Meeting
  • 2C. Ongoing Meeting Schedule
  • 2D. Proposers
  • 2E. Convenor
  • 2G. Input Specifications
  • 2I. Proposed Specification Titles

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:

• 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

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:

• Albert Brown, albertcbrown@us.ibm.com, IBM
• Cornelia Davis, Davis_Cornelia@emc.com, EMC
• Craig Randall, Randall_Craig@emc.com, EMC
• Derek Carr, dwcarr@us.ibm.com, IBM
• David Caruana, david.caruana@alfresco.com, Alfresco
• David Choy, Choy_David@emc.com, EMC
• Dustin Friesenhahn, dustinfr@microsoft.com, Microsoft
• Paul Goetz, paul.goetz@sap.com, SAP
• Ethan Gur-esh, ethang@microsoft.com, Microsoft
• Martin Hermes, martin.hermes@sap.com, SAP
• Jens Hübel, jhuebel@opentext.com, Open Text
• Ryan McVeigh, ryan.mcveigh@oracle.com, Oracle
• Gregory Melahn, melahn@us.ibm.com, IBM
• Pat Miller, patmill@microsoft.com, Microsoft
• Florian Müller, fmueller@opentext.com, Open Text
• John Newton, john.newton@alfresco.com, Alfresco
• Norrie Quinn, quinn_norrie@emc.com, EMC
• Steve Roth, steve.roth@oracle.com, Oracle

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.

• Announcements:
  • Announcement: "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."
  • Announcement: "Alfresco Provides First Draft CMIS Implementation via Alfresco Labs. Allows Companies to Gain Hands-On Experience with Proposed Content Management Standard."
  • Announcement: "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."
• CMIS v0.5:
  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Part I: Introduction, General Concepts, Data Model, and Services.
  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Part II: REST Protocol Binding.
  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Part II: SOAP Protocol Binding.
  • Content Management Interoperability Services. Appendices: Open Issues, Informative Examples, and Important Decisions.
• Input Specifications
  • EMC
  • IBM
  • Microsoft
• Proposed OASIS CMIS Technical Committee:
  • Proposed Charter for OASIS CMIS TC