Comments on: Looking at CMIS 1.0, Thinking of 2.0

By: ECM Customers Will Determine Who Wins « Confessions Of An eDOCS Junkie

ECM Customers Will Determine Who Wins « Confessions Of An eDOCS Junkie — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:05:49 +0000

[...] The Hybrids, Enterprise Records Management, and CMIS: Many of the largest users of ECM today don’t know it, but CMIS will be the answer to many of their long time prayers. Rarely do I speak with a customer today that does not already have more than one ECM technology in play. Yet, they all have continuously looked for a way to unify them. I think this is another area where SharePoint will greatly benefit…as well as the ‘legacy’ vendors. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve spoken with a customer that has technology X in use as its official RM application but has very little up-take by end users beyond those involved with the RM practice by trade or those mandated to use it. What both SharePoint and CMIS provide the legacies with is a way to truly execute an Enterprise RM Strategy. SharePoint is probably the easiest application out there to get end users to use….they already use Office every day. It’s not a stretch to believe that SharePoint can become the front end to nearly any and all ECM initiatives. On the backend, the CMIS protocol(s) potentially allow an organization to surface the content in all of the disparate apps they may have in a consistent SharePoint UI while also providing the mechanism by which a single RM app could manage said content regardless of where it originated from. Of course, in my opinion, a lot of that vision depends on how/if the CMIS standard evolves. Laurence Hart (@piewords) has a tremendous discussion and wish list for CMIS 2.0 here http://wordofpie.com/2009/12/08/looking-at-cmis-1-0-thinking-of-2-0/ [...]

By: Pie

Pie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:53:32 +0000

Just getting the ability to query against relationships would be good enough. Thanks for contributing.

By: Florent Guillaume

Florent Guillaume — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:05:34 +0000

You can express transitive relationships with JOINed queries, but you can't express the transitive closure of them. But then hardly any databases do, so I wouldn't hold my breath here.

By: Pie

Pie — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:33:29 +0000

Florent, thanks for the comments, here are some thoughts…

- I know there is enthusiasm for working on the next version, but we aren’t there yet and the momentum could always slow down, though I hope not.

- As for hierarchical metadata, line 477 has some confusion ” Choices MAY be hierarchically presented.”, which implies that there was some thought. However, not having it in 1.0 isn’t a failure.

- Domain models, you are right that the vendors would need to adjust their support. It would be a challenge, but it is something that would make life easier everywhere. As I think about it more, the hurdles are significant, but worth it.

- Transitive relationships can be grabbed if the query capability is there and you use sub-queries. A simpler way of doing things would be great, but it would be a challenge to add to the standard if most of the vendors don’t have underlying support.

By: Florent Guillaume

Florent Guillaume — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:53:59 +0000

Hi Laurence,

First, I can assure you there is the will for a CMIS 2.0. There even is already a “Proposals for 2.0″ section in the OASIS CMIS issue tracker.

I agree that Hierarchical Metadata and Tagging will need to be enhanced. No consensus (or even proposals to be honest) emerged during the 1.0 timeframe.

Regarding heterogenous domain models, I think what you want can be achieved but vendors will need to add some flexibility to the CMIS connectors. What’s needed for your example to work is for vendors to allow application developers to say that, while someone implemented the AIIMContent InfoManTopics field internally as a field “infomantop” with internal namespace “http://example.com/app/aiimcontent/v1″, it must be exposed to CMIS clients with the name “InfoManTopics”. But this has really to do with vendors, not the CMIS spec.

Regarding the ability to query relationships, I actually raised this last Monday in the TC, and it’s been agreed that it’s repository-specific to have this — meaning that a well constructed repository will give you queries on relationships (otherwise I agree with you that relationships would be pretty useless), see http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CMIS-602. What’s missing though in 1.0 is the ability to express transitive closure of relationships, which is quite useful in semantic modeling.