CMIS

CMIS has Arrived, Demo Anyone?

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[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=finish+line+olympics&iid=1345446″ src=”e/3/3/a/Olympics_Day_8_e351.jpg?adImageId=12737081&imageId=1345446″ width=”380″ height=”262″ /]The news today?  CMIS is now an official standard! I’m pretty stoked about the whole thing.  When I started this blog, after I got through my initial list of topics, it was the desire for a SOA-based standard for ECM that provided the desire.  Now that my desire has been met, almost three years later, what will I do for inspiration?

Simple, push for CMIS 2.0! In all seriousness, that is a post for another day. I want to focus on the actual release of the standard and the Demo where you can see it in action.

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Revisting the CMIS Use Cases

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A while back, I discussed the Three Fundamental Use Cases for CMIS. Since then, there have been some additional thoughts on this topic.  Since CMIS has been officially submitted as a standard to OASIS 🙂 I thought I would look at a couple of those thoughts.

The first was the EMC presentation on CMIS and DFS from the Momentum Europe in the fall.  It presented four cases, most notably a Migration use case.  This has popped-up in Twitter as well, so it obviously has some mindshare.

The other was a post by The Burton Group, specifically Larry Cannell, on How Will CMIS Be Adopted.  Larry focused on the business applications and had some good thoughts, especially regarding CMIS Clients.

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Exploring a Brave New World, HIMSS 2010

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image This is going to be a busy week for me.  I am off to HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta for a two primary reasons (and about a thousand secondary).  The first is to support my Healthcare colleagues from Washington Consulting at the conference.  The second, which will make the first all the more challenging, is to learn more about the vertical that is Healthcare IT.

Before I jump into it, a funny little joke.  When I was in a meeting and we were talking about the trip to HIMSS, someone mentioned HL7. Being one of many new terms to me, I didn’t ask them what it meant, just glanced at them with a curious look on my face.  They told me, and I kid you not, Look it up later. Just remember that there is no HL6 or 8.  Thanks for the help guys. ( I did learn what it was later and actually understood the “7” reference.)

Haven’t I Heard This Before?

So as I did research to get ready to hit the ground running, I saw a lot of challenges that the Healthcare industry is facing on the IT side.  I had heard most of it from a high level before in news reports and in Information Management/ECM case studies.  I had also picked some information up in planning for this year’s AIIM CMIS Demo.

When you strip out the names of the federal mandates and the acronyms that are common in the industry, I saw a lot words that I understood quite well:

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Looking Beyond Box’s Market-Speak

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Box.net.  In case you missed it, I basically called their term for their solution, which I refuse to use again, “market speak” and hype while implying much worse.

A week later, Aaron Levie, the CEO and cofounder of Box.net, was interviewed on Fierce Content Management.  Here he espoused a solid vision for Box’s hosted version of Content Management, though that term was heavily featured, again.

During all this, a very surprising thing thing happened, Aaron contacted me and asked if we could setup a time to chat so that I might better understand their vision.  I accepted his offer.  Our scheduled meshed today and I thought I would share.

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Is 2010 the Year of CMIS?

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imageYesterday, Fierce Content Management published an article that I wrote entitled The Future of CMIS.  I discussed what I see as a very busy, and important, year for CMIS.  It is a good article, at least on the Scale of Pie, and I am not going to be regurgitating it here for you.

Instead, I feel the need to clarify an inconsistency.  In the article I stated [bold added]:

The past year was a good year for the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The specification was released for public review and efforts began to build an Open Source implementation of CMIS,  Apache Chemistry. The next year promises to be even bigger…

I even proclaim that The future is now.  That is all well and good, but there is one thing hanging over that statement.  I predicted in my mandatory 2010 predictions post that:

2010 Will Not be the Year of CMIS

These statements appear to contradict each other.  Now I could just say that my thinking has evolved and excuse myself that way, but I’m not.  I’m sticking with both statements.

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"Cloud Content Management" Hype

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headdesk Every now and then, I read a post/article/tweet that makes me slam my head against the nearest hard surface.  The culprit this time was an article titled Cloud Content Management to Challenge ECM?

I saw the title and was intrigued.  I then read it and realized that the author had started falling for some market speak.  I quickly determined that the fault was not completely with the author.  Yes, they had fallen under the spell of some marketing and should have been strong enough to resist.  The real villian here? Box.

Remove the Cloud

Okay, lets think this through, logically.  First, let’s look at Box’s definition of Cloud Content Management.  When you look at it, you see them describing a SaaS offering.  More importantly, you are seeing them talk about the advantages of hosting it on the internet as opposed to your server room.

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Let the Games Begin, The 2010 AIIM CMIS Demo

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As promised, here is the “official” announcement of what the iECM Committee is doing this year for CMIS demo at the AIIM Expo.  This year we are trying to create a reference application that we can actually use for a long time and grow with new functionality.

We are looking for participants to help us out.  Read through and see if you would like to contribute.  There is also be a formal presentation on the demo scheduled for the AIIM Conference, and there will most likely be a panel discussion like the one held last year.

Here we go.  I copied it here, but you can download the PDF version if you prefer.

“Mission Statement”

To analyze and evaluate the CMIS standard in terms of it usability and the benefits of employing CMIS in the development of new services and applications which leverage one or more existing ECM systems; and to develop experience reports that capture best practices in the use of CMIS and CMIS compliant products.

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The AIIM CMIS Demo: Looking Back at 2009 and Ahead to 2010

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I’ve published a lot on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard since it’s initial public announcement in September of 2008.  One problem is that a lot of that content is spread out in multiple blog posts.

Demo Picture Well Thomas Pole, the AIIM iECM Committee chair, and I have written a whitepaper talking about the demo that the committee built for the AIIM Conference last year.  It talks about the ups and downs of designing and building the demo.  It classifies the demonstration using the three  fundamental CMIS use cases that I crafted this past summer and talks about what the upcoming demonstration is going to achieve.

If you want to read it, you can download the PDF version right here.

Did I mention that it has pretty pictures?

The section talking about the future is excerpted below.  There will be a more detailed post on that shortly.

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The AIIM iECM CMIS Demo, 2010 Remix

Last year, AIIM‘s iECM Committee put together a demonstration of the proposed CMIS 1.0 standard for the AIIM Conference in Philly.  Well, we are at it again for a bigger and better demo.

How is it going to be better?  I am glad you asked.  Here is what we are aiming for this year:

  • More vendors:  Last year we had three vendors (Alfresco, EMC, and Nuxeo) participating.  This year we already have four vendor commitments and we haven’t started groveling for more participants yet!
  • More CMIS scenarios:  Last year we only showed CMIS in the Federation scenario.  This year we are going to be showing TWO Federation scenarios AND, as a bonus, an Application to Repository scenario.  That’s right, we are going to be switching our front-end application between the different repositories ON THE FLY!
  • Real-world use cases: Okay, maybe not “real” world, but we are going to be using the Health Care Industry as a basis for this year’s demonstration.  Our meta-data model and use cases will focus on the management of content of a patients health care record.  Things will be simplified, this is a CMIS demo after-all, but you will be able to see a real-world application for CMIS that doesn’t involve a generic ECM interface.
  • CMIS Version 1.0: This is really just for me.  Last year everything was draft this and beta that.  I’m expecting a much more streamlined development process this year.

You want more?  How about this…there is going to be a session on the demo at the AIIM Conference this year presented by myself and Thomas Pole, the iECM Committee Chair talking about the demo and a whitepaper that will be developed in conjunction.

In the next few days, you will see a more detailed description of this year’s demonstration and a whitepaper that Thomas and I have written about the status of the standard, the story of last year’s demo, and what we are planning for this year.

Exciting times people, exciting times.

Documentum Renewal: Architecting Content Applications

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Of all my posts in this series, this is the one that is probably the least needed.  I say this because it looks like EMC is some of this now.  It does need to be said though, just so EMC know that we still care, and in case I am guessing wrong.  The themes for the Architecting of Content Applications is closely related to the Application Separation topic and in many ways, is the complement to the Focus on the Core edition.

I’m going to stay away from some specific feature requests for applications.  I would want to do complete run-downs on any app before I did that.  I want to be a little more strategic in my advice.

As always, please feel free to add/comment.

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