ECM: Everyone on a Single Page?

A dream come true for content managers? Or another spec that can’t live up to expectations? It’s too early to tell, but on the surface, there’s a new specification around Content Managment that seems to have good potential.

Alfresco, EMC (Documentum), IBM (FileNet), Microsoft (SharePoint) and other ECM vendors have teamed up in the creation of a standard that would allow some amount of interoperability of content management systems.

The new specification is called Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and it is being submitted to the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for approval. If all goes according to plan, the specification could be accepted and ratified near the end of 2009. Creation of the specification has taken more than two years of work. The specification centers around SOAP and REST transfer protocol.

The goal is for CMIS to be to Content Management as SQL is to Database Management. Actually CMIS includes a content management language for querying the repository that is similar to the SQL query language. Queries could be made over location and properties or via full-text.

IBM’s Ken Bisconti commented that “the goal was really to create a specification that is language- and platform-agnostic.” Bisconti commented that some vendors may be starting to build widgets and services based on CMIS and these may hit the market prior to the final ratification. Although most vendors aren’t expected to be using the spec until well after ratification.

Alfresco is one of those vendors. As usual, they’re on the cutting edge. Not only did Alfresco participate in drafting CMIS, they already have a draft implementation available for download. And Alfresco plans to be giving webinars and tutorials about CMIS in the coming months.

“CMIS will ultimately become the foundation for developing next generation content collaboration and social computing applications,” said John Newton, Chairman and CTO, Alfresco Software. “Developers can start exploring CMIS today with the draft implementation available from Alfresco Labs. CMIS will enable anyone to develop content applications on open source Alfresco and deploy them on SharePoint, EMC, IBM, or OpenText.”