Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

Microsoft has collaborated with EMC, IBM and other leading software vendors to create the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. The jointly developed specification is designed to simplify interoperability with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems by leveraging existing open standards including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), REST (Representational State Transfer) and Atom.

To achieve the goal of interoperability between ECM systems and to facilitate the development of content centric applications, the following criteria were guiding principles for the development of the CMIS specification:

• Work over existing repositories enabling customers to build and leverage applications against multiple repositories
• Platform and language agnostic
• Provide common web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to dramatically simplify application development
• De-couple web services and content from the content management repository, enabling customers to manage content independently
• Support composite application development and mash-ups by the business or IT analyst

The companies involved have submitted the CMIS specification to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for advancement through its open standards process. With this transition, the CMIS technical specification will be managed by a technical committee within OASIS.

Enabling interoperability between ECM systems

Many companies today deal with multiple content repositories from different vendors. Whether this is driven by discrete business unit requirements, application specific solutions or mergers and acquisitions, connecting and sharing information among heterogeneous repositories reduces business flexibility while adding complexity and cost. CMIS addresses these challenges by providing core content services for connecting heterogeneous repositories within a corporate intranet or over the public Internet.

Leveraging the CMIS specification, customers with multi-vendor ECM systems will be able to dramatically reduce the IT burden of creating and maintaining custom integration code, enabling disparate systems to communicate with each other. Critical Data that was previously scattered within the enterprise can now be leveraged to its full business potential.

A new generation of content centric application

CMIS is designed around a services architecture based on SOAP, REST and Atom to simplify application development. The process of developing content centric applications that are repository independent or that are capable of working with the content from various repositories becomes a viable option as a result of the CMIS specification. Examples of the types of applications we believe customers and independent software vendors will create include content mash-ups, document and records management applications, electronic discovery, multi channel publishing solutions and end-user collaborative workspaces and portals.

CMIS demonstrates Microsoft's enhanced support for industry standards and will allow developers and independent software vendors to better interact with existing ECM systems and invent new solutions for customers.

SOURCE: Microsoft