At the end of January, I talked about the proposed effort being undertaken by the iECM committee to create a CMIS demonstration for the AIIM Expo. Things are going well and I am working with others to build the demonstration. I wanted to share a few details with you.

• We are implementing the Web Service binding for CMIS. While REST would be better for what we are doing, it was felt that the Web Services binding would be easier for the development team to churn out.
• As a result of that, the participating vendors are Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Nuxeo. Microsoft wanted to participate was not sure that their Web Services binding would be complete in time.
• Each vendor will have a two issues worth of articles from AIIM’s bi-monthly publication, Infonomics.  In addition, each vendor is welcome to add their own white papers and collateral to the system.
• Users will search on metadata and/or full text. All searches will be round-robin sorted so that each repository has multiple hits on the first page, assuming that they have any content that meets the criteria.
• The system is being developed in .NET because we were able to identify a free hosting server that could support the effort.
• We, including myself, are going to be at the Expo on April 2nd to talk about it. I’ll share the exact time when I have it.

That is about it. I’ll be working and trying to get a basic search up this week. The second step will be performing this in a federated manner against multiple repositories.

I’ll share the journey as it unfolds. Until then, here is a modified version of the metadata model:

Object: AIIMContent

Name	Type	MaxLen	Cardinality	OpenChoice	Req.
Title	String	100	single	na	TRUE
Sub-Title	String	100	single	na	FALSE
Authors	String	25	multi	na	FALSE
Publication Date	DateTime	na	single	na	TRUE
Keywords	String	50	multi	na	FALSE
Source Repository*	String	25	single	na	TRUE
Information Management Topics	String	60	multi	FALSE	FALSE
IT Topics	String	40	multi	FALSE	FALSE
Industries	String	30	multi	FALSE	FALSE
Lifecycle Stages	String	25	multi	FALSE	FALSE

* Each Vendor will have the same value for all content in their repository.  It will clearly identify the vendor and may identify any other repository product information. For example, in my development Documentum repository, I’ve set this to “EMC Documentum”. Of course, EMC may actually us a different value if they desire.