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ECM/CMIS: Building a Bridge Between Apps
The promise of the Content Management Interoperability Services specification is the ability to lower the barrier to sharing information between enterprise applications.
Most organizations have their data scattered across a minimum of six different repositories. And that makes getting a unified view of data a difficult task, hindering efforts like eDiscovery and Business Intelligence. The current tools available for integrating the various systems are repository APIs, and APIs are typically vendor-specific, so integrating multiple repositories and maintaining links between systems and applications can be a big undertaking.
The need to open up ECM repository data has been recognized for some time. In fact, 59 percent of companies say that they want to be able to more easily integrate their applications with the data stored in ECM repositories.
The CMIS standard has been designed to solve this very problem. The beauty of it is that developers can build applications that access repositories via a single standard interface. It’s a sort of ‘write once, run everywhere’ concept. Developers will spend less time writing the back-end logic to connect to repositories and free up more of their time to create better applications that focus on solving business problems.
Some are predicting that CMIS will stir innovation in the creation of whole new classes of applications, in much that same way as the standardization on SQL for databases resulted in a wave of data-driven applications that were introduced in the 1980’s. Proponents of CMIS argue that users aren’t so much interested in the back-end repository used to hold their data as they are in the capabilities of their business applications.
Sounds good? It is, but hold on. It’s not there yet. CMIS is working its way through the OASIS standards committee and has still not been officially sanctioned. And because of that, some vendors have been holding off before starting implementation, waiting to make sure that won’t be working from a specification that is changing underneath them.
Alfresco has been way ahead of the curve and has offered a CMIS API for months. Microsoft and EMC/Documentum are expecting to offer CMIS in the first half of 2010, while Open Text and IBM have announced CMIS for later in the year.
By the end of the year we should start seeing business applications adding a new check box to their specifications: “support for any CMIS-compliant repository”.
