Tag Archives: content management

CMIS Interoperability

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CMS Wire recently picked up the development of CMIS Explorer by Shane Johnson (@shane_dev) at CityTech. CMIS Explorer (download) is a browser application written in Adobe AIR and Flex that uses the RESTful AtomPub binding of the proposed CMIS standard to interact with CMIS-compliant repositories.

Already early access support for CMIS is available from EMC, IBM and Alfresco. Such support makes it possible for applications like CMIS Explorer to be applied to a variety of content repositories in ways not possible before CMIS.

As fellow OASIS CMIS TC member Florent Guillaume from Nuxeo comments, though, CMIS is not yet a formal (fixed) standard. It is under development and somewhat fluid.

When a content repository vendor provides draft support, don’t assume that such support fully conforms to the current draft specification (e.g. v0.5). If you’re an application developer like Shane, you can know conformance exists by first building against what is specified on the OASIS site for CMIS and then pointing your application at desired content repository or repositories.

For example, you can point CMIS Explorer at a Documentum content repository via EMC CMIS support EA2 to search and to see types.

Searching a Docbase via CMIS Explorer

Reviewing Docbase types via CMIS Explorer

However, while basic interoperability seems OK, something prevents actual browsing functionality in CMIS Explorer from working with Documentum. In its com.citytechinc.cmis.Repository.setFolder() method, CMIS Explorer tries to get folder objects from root children via the following condition:
f.object.properties.propertyString.(@name=='BaseType').value == "folder"
However, draft CMIS specification v0.5 does not define a BaseType property, not does the EMC CMIS support EA2 contain this property. As a result, CMIS Explorer cannot find any folder object in root children, which prevents it from being able to browse a Docbase.

To be fair, my colleague, Norrie Quinn, has already pointed out this matter on Shane’s post, and Shane has replied.

My focus here is simply as follows: It’s important for applications to leverage the currently proposed CMIS bindings from OASIS rather than a particular vendor’s implementation of these bindings in order to promote interoperability.

It will be good to see the emergence of CMIS-based applications that go beyond exploration, navigation and portal-style user experiences. Such applications will help to influence the CMIS roadmap beyond version 1.0.

In the meantime, it’s great to see open source efforts like CMIS Explorer take root today. Thanks, Shane.

P.S. It would be good to see a community form around CMIS-based application development (e.g. shine a light on individual efforts, potentially pool interest and resources, solicit ideas and challenges, etc.). If you’re interested in something like, please leave me a comment. In the meantime, I plan to promote community efforts here as best I can. Thanks.

Microsoft Office TownSquare

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News about TownSquare is making its way across the Internet. I’m not surprised that Chris Pratley has a hand in this venture either. He was the original creative force behind OneNote, a tool that quickly found its way into my “appbox” as a mainstream application/tool.

As Chris recalls, apparently this caught the attention of Jeff Raikes, which led to the following:

Jeff had a two-part mission for me that was simple to say and hard to do. Basically he said, “help the division try more ideas”, and “explain to the world and the company what our long term vision is for productivity”.

Since moving over to be the GM of Office Labs, Chris & Co. have been busy working on what some have called “SharePoint + Facebook.” Since I’m not a Microsoft employee, I haven’t been able to test drive TownSquare first hand. Perhaps, after tomorrow at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, this will soon change. :-)

Update 6/11/2008: Digging around a bit more, I see that Chris is presenting “Accelerating Innovation within the Enterprise: The Value of Rapid Prototyping and User Insights” today with Nelle Steele, User Experience – Ethnographer, Microsoft Office Labs. This article on Nelle’s SMB work only increases my interested in TownSquare.

Hands-on DFS

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DFS hands-on lab participants at EMC World 2008

Tom and I were able to present to another great set of attendees–lots of healthy curiosity and great questions. Now that the labs have been conducted, here are the presentation slides–version from today, which was slightly modified from Monday’s deck.

It’s been a great talking with a lot of folks about DFS and content management in general. Thanks to everyone who shared their current experience with DFS, their ideas and their issues. The product will be better because of you. Thanks! :-)

DFS best practices

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This afternoon, colleagues Mike Mohen and Paul Kwitkin presented a well-attended session, “Documentum Foundation Services – Best Practices and Real World Examples.” It’s always a good thing to have someone else be able to tell folks how well your software performs under load and back it up with hard numbers and context. Usually this session takes about four hours to present in depth; so, Mike and Paul did a good job distilling the essence down to just an hour or so.

Mike and Paul work in CMA’s Professional Services organization, helping customers deploy enterprise solutions that typically involve out of the box services from DFS as well as custom service development and custom service consumer (solution) development. What we do in engineering it what Professional Services does in terms of building services and service consumers. It’s also the very same advice offered at today’s session, which will be repeated on Thursday. So, this material is not just about you, our audience, but it’s very much about EMC, too.

I’ve already asked Mike for his presentation, demos and source code; so, once I receive this content, I’ll make it available here.

Earlier today, I sat in on Victor Spivak’s “Documentum Architecture Deep Dive” session. (Pie blogged about this session in a fair bit of detail here and here.) As you might expect, DFS was a prominently discussed within the broader context of all Documentum architecture. (For those who don’t know, Victor is EMC Content Management and Archiving division’s Chief Architect. Victor is also an EMC Fellow and a really good guy.)

It’s really quite exciting to see such a consistently strong turn-out for the developer-oriented sessions at this year’s EMC World conference–much stronger than last year. It’s a privilege to have so many folks interested in what you’ve worked so hard with others to produce–both to tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Already this week I’ve received great feedback that will make DFS an even better product in future releases. Once my customer meetings this week subside a bit, I hope to share what I’ve learned with you here in more detail.

Update 5/21/2008: Here are the slides Mike and Paul presented. Looks like the real world examples will become available soon, too. Cheers.

Update 10/24/2008: You can access the recording of this session, now, here.