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ECM: Everybody Speaking the Same Lingo
The vision of content management interoperability has been around for some time. But successes in realizing the vision have been scant and the few that exist have been fairly brittle point-to-point ‘connectors’ between specific versions of vendor products. JSR-170 has been the most recent attempt to standardize interfaces between systems, but still lacked wide-spread acceptance partly because it was hobbled by it’s Java-centric approach. And before JSR-170, other failed attempts to achieve interoperability include ODMA and DMA.
Now, the latest attempt to create a standard content management interface is CMIS — Content Management Interoperability Services. CMIS is a not-official standard that has been hammered out between IBM, Open Text, EMC/Documentum, SAP and Alfresco. It describes a method to create and manage documents across different content repositories. CMIS includes a standard way to create, read/view, update and delete documents across any repository.
People are drawing the analogy of CMIS to SQL. The emergence of SQL as a standard language for relational databases did much to promote and help grow the popularity and usability of databases. People in the content industry are hoping that CMIS might be the technology that can also grow the popularity of content management. If CMIS catches on, cost to adopt CM should decrease, and a common document language might mean the technology will become a common software building block, much like the widespread use of SQL in applications.
Alfresco was the first vendor with a CMIS implementation. And now EMC has one too. Many expect that IBM/FileNet and even Microsoft/SharePoint to follow up soon. It’s still too early to say, but at this early stage CMIS is shaping up to be a interaoperability standard for content that can achieve wide acceptance.
