Working together with CMIS - EMC Community Network

Working together with CMISHimakara Pieris, December 2009hpieris@daedalworld.com

OverviewMultiple content management systems within the same organization have become a commonpractice, especially after SharePoint making a comeback two years ago. Content management systemsare sometimes separated at the department lines, function lines, and in certain other cases things arelittle more grey. Now more than ever, the important question is, can these systems work together,without product specific plug-ins? Is there a third option, other than creating content silos throughvarious content management products, or paying for custom plug-ins? CMIS aims to be the solution.Content Management Interoperability Services or CMIS for short is a result of collaborativeeffort from major ECM vendors, including EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, OpenText, etc. It is a standard,a technical specification developed through OASIS that describes an interface, any CMIS supporting ECMsystem should implement. While certain functionalities described in the specification must beimplemented by an ECM system in order be compliant, the others are optional. Specification aims toaddress the most common denominator of the ECM functionalities.CMIS provides a strongly typed object model, with four different types of objects (i.e.Document, Folder, Relationship and Policy). Two protocol binding options are provided, SOAP/WSDL forservice based binding and REST/Atom for resource based binding. Specification includes query support,type hierarchy/ inheritance support and document versioning support. Authentication is to be handledby the protocol. However, user’s level of access is governed by the repository.ChallengesCMIS is not the first standard to enter ECM space. Any technology standard battles quite a fewchallenges during its making, these include: platform or technology bias, scope, lack of support and thecore differences among application platforms.Platform or Technology BiasA technology or platform bias could greatly hinder the adoption and growth of astandardization effort; this is especially true when the standard discusses interoperabilityamong products from different vendors. In the case of CMIS, it is interesting to notice, howleading vendors in the marketplace have come together to develop a technology specificationwithout any platform bias. CMIS doesn’t favor any technology platforms, integrationmechanisms are implemented using standard open technologies.ScopeIdentifying the scope properly is crucial. Limited scope would make the specification lesseffective, while a broader specification would render the standard too complex, affecting thebuy-in of the stake holders. CMIS addresses the challenge by aiming to support a very commonset of features. Specification provides two categories of features: mandatory and optional, asthe names imply a content management system must expose all mandatory features to be