Leaders of the Enterprise Content Management System have finally decided to allow interoperability across content repositories
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Enterprise Content Management vendors EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation have announced the publication of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), distributed as a ZIP archive with four prose documents and a collection of schemas, WSDLs, and XML instances. According to the published Introduction, the CMIS standard is intended to “define a domain model and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. The CMIS interface is designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. It is not intended to prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those CM systems, nor to exhaustively expose all of the CM system’s capabilities through the CMIS interfaces. Rather, it is intended to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by a CM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities…”
CMIS uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. “The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multivendor, multirepository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to talk to one another…”
CMIS has been in development for two years, culminating in a vendor software interoperability Plugfest in August 2008 in Redmond, WA. Working together since late 2006, the three companies were joined in the creation of the CMIS draft specification by other leading software providers including: Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. A final gathering of all seven companies was recently held to validate interoperability of the specification before submission to OASIS.”
Alfresco has now announced the availability of the first Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft implementation from Alfresco Labs. The Draft CMIS Implementation is freely available for download. It offers support for the CMIS REST and Web Services bindings allowing client applications to connect to, navigate, read, and create content against the Alfresco content repository. It also supports the CMIS Query Language providing SQL-like querying of the repository including location, properties, and full-text. A CMIS Test Suite is provided to allow compliance compatibility testing against any CMIS compliant REST Binding.”
An announcement from Open Text reports that Open Text has worked with SAP AG to “create a prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services… With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organize information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface. Open Text is a member of the group of companies working to develop the standard.”
“The objective of the CMIS standard is to define a common content management web services interface that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories. These capabilities and interfaces will not match every existing content management system and may require some level of change to existing products, at least in terms of conforming existing interfaces to those defined here. However, it is an explicit goal that CMIS will not require major product changes or significant data model changes like other standards such as JSR 170 have required…”
“The CMIS standard will expose core/common ECM repository capabilities in an intentionally generic way. These will allow for applications to be constructed that can work with content residing in one or more ECM repositories, without having to understand implementation differences between the individual repositories or worrying about interface inconsistencies between the repositories…
While most/all of the capabilities that will be exposed via CMIS generally fall into the core/basic functions of an ECM repository, the goal of this standard is to ensure that ECM applications can be built on top of the CMIS interfaces that enable richer/business critical applications and use cases, like Business Process Management and Electronic Discovery. Because those application use cases have been under consideration through the CMIS design process, CMIS will enable ECM applications to focus on solving business logic problems at the application-level without worrying about the implementations of specific ECM repositories…
“By providing a services-oriented architecture for interacting with an ECM repository, ECM applications can use CMIS to be loosely-coupled to individual repositories, rather than more tightly integrated. This will make it simpler for (a) applications to use CMIS interfaces ‘a la carte’ rather than having to having to invoke the full-set of CMIS interfaces, and (b) allow applications to be built in a Services Oriented Architecture.
According to the published “Overview of Content Management Interoperability Services 1.0,” CMIS “defines four base types of objects that exist within a Repository, where the Repository can define additional Object Types for any of these type of objects. An Object Type specifies the schema of Properties that are allowed or required for the object. (1) Documents represent individual content objects in the repository. A Document may or may not include one content-stream. (2) Folders represent organizational containers in which Documents (or other folders) can be stored.(3) Relationships represent loose relationships between exactly two (2) objects (documents or folders) in the Repository. (4) Policies represent administrative policies that may be applied to objects.”
CMIS “exposes services for:
Discovering Object Type definitions and other Repository information — including which optional capabilities are supported by a particular Repository
Creating, Reading, Updating, and Deleting objects
Filing Documents into zero, one, or more Folders — if the repository supports the optional multi-filing capability
Navigating and traversing the hierarchy of folders in the Repository
Creating versions of Documents and accessing a Document’s version history
Querying a repository to retrieve one or more objects matching user-specified search criteria, including full-text search queries”
Document objects can be versioned, but ‘folder’, ‘relationship’, and ‘policy’ objects are not versioned. All methods for referring/retrieving a Document can specify whether they refer to a specific version of a Document, or should always retrieve the latest version.
A CMIS Repository has the option of supporting multi-filing of Documents into zero, one, or more than one folder concurrently. Folders can never be multi-filed. The Repository’s level of support for multi-filing will be exposed to applications through the Repository service…”
On September 10, 2008, OASIS member companies submitted a proposed charter for a new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee. Based upon Version 0.5 of the CMIS specification, the TC would “define a domain model including a data model and abstract capabilities for Content Management (CM) and a set of bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories/systems and that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories.”
Source: OASIS CMIS
