Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)
Overview
In the later part of 2008, OASIS announced the formation of a committee to standardize a web services interface specification that will enable interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. EMC, IBM and Microsoft lead the way by developing the initial draft for the standard. Other EMC vendors such as Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, SAP and others reviewed this intial draft and provided comments on the draft prior to selecting OASIS to advance the standard through the standardization process.
The OASIS CMIS standard makes use of web services and the widely used, popular protocols of SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol and REST, Representational State Transfer. Its focus is on the basic content functions such as creating, reading, writing, deleting and searching for content across repositories. CMIS makes sure content repositories and solutions are able to interoperate by being independent of operating systems and architectures. Since many organizations already use SOAP and REST protocols, CMIS should receive wide adoption when it is approved and published.
The benefit for CMIS to end users is the ability to more efficiently search the many content repositories that organizations typically have using one ECM solution to interact wtih the content that may, in fact, be managed by many content management solutions. You will be able to have workflows that utilize content from many repositories. Content management solutions will be more flexible and better able to meet your organization's needs.
Status of the CMIS
CMIS was approved as an OASIS standard in April 2010. For more information, visit http://www.oasis-open.org.
iECM CMIS Demonstration
In case you missed the iECM CMIS demonstration at Info360, you can still experience it at http://bit.ly/caxmqy. You will see federated searching in action.
Participating Organizations
CMIS is being developed by a number of the Enterprise Content Management vendors such as:
- Adobe Systems Incorporated
- Alfresco Software
- ASG Software Solutions
- Content Technologies ApS
- Ektron
- EMC Corporation
- ESoCE-NET
- Exalead, Inc.
- FatWire
- Flatiron Solutions Corporation
- Greenbytes GmbH
- Harris Corporation
- IBM
- Microsoft Corporation
- Nuxeo
- Open Text Corporation
- Oracle Corporation
- SAP AG
- Saperion AG
- Sun Microsystems
- Vignette Corporation
Supplemental Resources
Resources to help you better understand CMIS and the benefits it will have for your organization:
Presentations
Blogs The following are blogs that provide current discussion on CMIS:
Other CMIS Resource Centers Demonstration
During the 2010 Info360 (http://www.aiimexpo.com) event in Philadelphia, the AIIM iECM committee demonstrated the use of CMIS. For the demonstration, users were able to search multiple repositories that were located in numerous locations as well as in a cloud. The demonstration web site is http://www.aiim-iecm.org. To see the press release about the demonstration.
AIIM iECM Committee
The AIIM Interoperable Enterprise Content Management Committee will be assisting the CMIS committee by identifying and producing end user case studies that support the principles of CMIS. The committee will also be developing toolkits to assist end user organizations in the implementation of CMIS and CMIS compliant products. If you want to participate on the AIIM iECM Committee, please email Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org.
Products
The following products are compliant with the latest CMIS specification.
More information and to get involved
If you are interested in participating on this effort, please contact http://www.oasis-open.org to join OASIS and the CMIS Technical Committee.
