Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

No, I know that the coincidence of this announcement, on Day 4 after I’ve started in the new role of working with SharePoint Partners, has many of you wondering what I could possibly have up my sleeve for the following week. 

Well, I’m not in the habit of pre-announcing announcements prior to the day when the announcement should be announced, so I can’t tell you that.  Just be scared.  Very scared.

Actually, this is a great announcement, and one that I’m thrilled about.  I’ve worked with CMS systems for about 12 years now, and I tried to believe that WSRP was going to solve all of our problems, when that beast came out, but it didn’t.  So, I’m actually a bit reserved about how to take this news. 

Let’s say, first of all, that I think it will be a while before we see a broadly replicable implementation of this.  The draft isn’t even final yet.  (Wow – deja vu).

What do I think is incredibly significant is that the IBM FileNet guys and the ECM Documentum guys and the Microsoft SharePoint guys must have spent days in the same room trying to figure this out, and probably realized that they can work together. 

I’m actually very optimistic  by nature, and I hope that we can make great things work from this more open relationship.  I’ll try hard to do my part.

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EMC, IBM and Microsoft Jointly Create First Web Services Interface Specification for Greater Interoperability of Enterprise Content Management Systems

On Wednesday, September 10 (2008), Microsoft announced a jointly developed specification which used Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. The companies intend to submit the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process. The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments.

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