I am excited to (finally) say that 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.
The current draft specification will be submitted to OASIS and managed by technical committee to guide it toward finalization as a standard.
I said “finally” above because it’s been over two years since I first talked about ECM standards, admittedly (and out of legal obligation) at a high-level–followed up one year ago, here. So, finally, all can become clear…! 
In preparation for today’s announcement, I had the opportunity to interview Kyle McNabb, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research, to share his thoughts on the announcement. You can listen to Kyle’s perspectives as I ask him the following questions:
- Why is CMIS needed?
- Why does it matter who is involved in CMIS?
- Why is CMIS a step in the right direction?
- What will be the near-term impact of CMIS on the market?
- What will be the impact of CMIS to the industry as whole, including ISVs as well as organizations at the enterprise or department levels?
- What can enterprises expect in the future and how CMIS will help them over the long haul?
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’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.
As with any significant industry announcement, I expect to see plenty of press coverage by those companies involved, by analysts, etc. I’m also looking forward to what my EMC colleagues have to say about CMIS (e.g. Cornelia Davis, Andrew Chapman, Dave Graham, Len Devanna, Chuck Hollis, and Mark Lewis).
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. You can also download a whitepaper that details technology concepts and business considerations involved with CMIS.
This first post on CMIS is intended to set the stage for deeper conversations about the specification, its domain model, its service model, and what its impact can become. So, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or otherwise join the conversation.
Update (today):
(1) Chuck Hollis has posted his thoughts on why CMIS is not JAS (just another standard). Good reading.
(2) Andrew Chapman has posted his thoughts (er, introduced a new word) on potential SharePoint de-silofication driven by CMIS. Another good read.
Update (9/12/2008):
(1) OASIS Proposed Charter for CMIS TC
(2) Mark Lewis addresses commoditization questions raised by CMIS.
Update (9/14/2008): OASIS coverage of CMIS news
15 responses so far ↓
1 pmonks // Sep 10, 2008 at 9:57 am
It’s worth noting that Alfresco (who, along with OpenText, Oracle and SAP, also participated in the CMIS standards body) is about to release the first implementation of the CMIS spec.
It will be interesting to see how quickly the traditional vendors are able to surface these capabilities in their offerings.
2 Craig Randall // Sep 10, 2008 at 10:58 am
As an Alfresco contributor, Peter, I understand your comment.
It’s good to have broad vendor representation, including Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, in CMIS.
Beyond “quick,” it’s my hope that ECM vendors will focus on “quality” too in the sense of enabling Customers to visualize and interact with CMIS-compliant offerings–both content repositories and content-centric applications–to promote the interoperable vision behind the standard.
Of course moving CMIS to OASIS should continue to open the detailed conversation about CMIS beyond the original authors (EMC, IBM, Microsoft, et al). The to-be-formed TC has important work to commence…
3 Craig Randall // Sep 10, 2008 at 12:01 pm
BTW, I enjoyed John Newton’s chronological association of CMIS with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. As usual, The Big Picture has excellent visual coverage of LHC.
4 Enter CMIS, a Proposed ECM-SOA Standard « Word of Pie // Sep 10, 2008 at 7:24 pm
[...] of it is new, but it is GREAT to see it espoused by senior management at an ECM community. (More on EMC and this standard very [...]
5 Cornelia Davis’ Weblog » CMIS and Atom/AtomPub // Sep 10, 2008 at 8:41 pm
[...] has been widely blogged on by Craig Randall, Chuck Hollis, Andrew Chapman, John Newton, Ethan Gur-esh, David Nueschaler and many analysts [...]
6 Content Management Interoperability Services « Paul Warren // Sep 11, 2008 at 8:24 am
[...] is already a plethora of good, initial write up out there in the blogosphere from my colleagues; Craig Randall, Chuck Hollis, Cornelia Davis, Andrew Chapman. From former colleagues; John Newton. [...]
7 CMIS « Observing Content Management // Sep 12, 2008 at 8:49 am
[...] certainly has been some activity on this front on some of the blogs out there, e.g. Pie, BMOC, Craig and John Newton amongst others. In case you are not aware, this is what has sparked the sudden [...]
8 CMIS: My Take & Link Roundup (Fusion ECM) // Sep 12, 2008 at 6:27 pm
[...] Craig Randall I’m optimistic about the kind of emergence with the announcement of CMIS. [...]
9 CMIS webinar | Craig's Musings // Sep 18, 2008 at 5:10 pm
[...] The audio recording of this event is already available here, and it does capture the Q&A toward the end. [...]
10 CMIS | Dries Buytaert // Sep 19, 2008 at 10:29 am
[...] probably take years before this becomes an actual standard and before it gets widely adopted, but it is interesting for at least two reasons: [...]
11 De-hyping CMIS | Craig's Musings // Oct 1, 2008 at 2:23 pm
[...] 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 [...]
12 EMC and the CMIS Standard « Word of Pie // Oct 3, 2008 at 7:53 am
[...] may not have known in order to plan. EMC had the press release and fresh blog posts from Craig, Cornelia, Chuck, Mark, and Andrew. They even have a page with links to all the blog [...]
13 Lost! » Blog Archive » Just What The Heck Is A “Knowledge Worker” Anyway? // Oct 22, 2008 at 1:15 pm
[...] all that said, if any of that peaked your interest, you really need to check out Craig’s Blog. He’s got a very long, detailed, post about CMIS, how it works, who it deals with and even [...]
14 Cover Pages technology report for CMIS | Craig's Musings // Nov 4, 2008 at 12:57 pm
[...] Cover just published a technology report for CMIS to support the activities of the OASIS CMIS TC and external commentary, and with the intent to [...]
15 Lost! » Blog Archive » Microsoft & Alfresco Agree On Something: CMIS // Nov 5, 2008 at 12:56 pm
[...] I’m going to point to someone that has done a great job of explaining how the system works. Craig does a great job of explaining how things work, how things inter-operate and it even has pictures for those of you that hate to [...]
You must log in to post a comment.