The speed of adoption of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) will depend on the ECM vendors supporting CMIS for the product versions broadly used by enterprises.
Unfortunately, ECM vendors in general are not currently implementing CMIS support for older versions of their products – although they do offer this feature in their upcoming or latest product release (as noted by fellow blogger Rupin Mago from the show floor of EMC World 2010).
CMIS is an open standard maintained by OASIS that defines how to access content in a CMIS-compliant ECM repository. This allows applications to interoperate with multiple ECM repositories by different vendors, eliminating the need for customers and ISVs to develop and maintain ECM-specific connectors.
Most organizations have multiple ECM systems – inherited through acquisitions, deployed for specific solutions, part of widespread adoption of SharePoint.
CMIS has the following advantages:
- It is an open standard that provides vendor neutrality and interoperability
- CMIS is independent of the programming language, unlike Java Specification Requests (JSR), for example
- Many of the ECM vendors, including the top three – EMC, IBM and Microsoft – are on board
The founding members of the committee who created the initial CMIS specification – again, EMC, IBM and Microsoft – already support, or will support, the spec in 2010. In addition, many other ECM vendors such as Alfresco, Day Software and Oracle – all members of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee– have similar timelines.
For the enterprises, migrating to newer ECM versions is costly and time consuming, and the benefit of CMIS may not provide a viable business case for them to migrate in the near future.
If ECM vendors are truly on board, why would they not implement CMIS support for the most broadly used versions of their product? Are enterprises in a tough position because of this?
