CMIS

EMC Opens Their Eyes and Has a Vision

Went to the EMC Federal Forum yesterday here in Washington, DC.  I enjoy this event, if for no other reason than it is one of the few times a year that EMC people actually come to my town.  They’ve realized that it is easier to just talk to me than to try and avoid me, so it is now a truly fun and informative event.

The value of the breakouts were a mixed bag.  Many were similar to sessions from EMC World, which is perfect for this event as many users in the Federal Government could not make the trip to Orlando.  I did attend EMC World, so a lot of things weren’t exactly new.  I did Tweet some updates, and you can search #emcff for more tweets.  I decided to blog the keynote as it was focused on the EMC Strategy and Vision.

As you may recall, Vision was a problem at EMC World this year.  No Vision was really presented.  It was a nice description of things now, but Vision was lacking.  Rick Devenuti, the Sr. VP and COO of the CMA Division, has been tasked with sharing the “Vision” at this event.

I’m typed some notes as Rick talked and I have provided those at the bottom of the post.  Due to the content of the keynote, I’m providing a summary as well.  Keep in mind that this was a U.S. Federal Forum, so that market was the focus.

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CMIS, Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep

Kas Thomas wrote a post about how CMIS could be called DMIS as it is more for document management systems than content management systems. This hit me on two fronts. The first is with the concept of “CMS”.

Why is it that when I talk to people about “CMS”, they are almost always referring to Web Content Management? Seems to be a pretty narrow definition of the use of content. Along the same lines, many “Information Architects” that work with these “CMS” applications seem to be senior website designers. I’ve met Information Architects that I felt deserved the title, but they dealt with things beyond, though including, the web.  Enough of that, for now, on to the main course…

The second, is of course the slight to CMIS. That is the focus today. While I encourage criticism of CMIS as criticism is important for growth, I don’t want misconceptions to perpetuate themselves.

Sticks and Stones

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Talking on CMIS at EMC World and Other Slides

In case you missed it, there were a lot of presentations last week at EMC World.  While most of the slides are only available to attendees, there are a few exceptions.  The first is my presentation.  Since I wrote part of it and was a co-presenter with Karin Ondricek of EMC, I was given permission to share it online.  I’m throwing it out there for everyone to see, especially as I didn’t take notes on my own presentation.

One thing that I always convey when I talk about the AIIM iECM demo, that isn’t on the slides, is that it took 1 hour to add Nuxeo to the Federated Search demo, and that was with declaring the CMIS Web Services manually within Visual Studio.  That took half an hour.  For more details on the demo source code a other valuable links, look at my previous post on the The Source Code from the AIIM iECM CMIS Demo.

Mark Lewis’ Keynote

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Documentum, So Close and Still So Far Away with SharePoint

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Apologies to Andrew on this post, but I’ve got to get everything out of my system before I learn anything new NDA items about the two products working together. I think EMC is moving in right direction on these products, but they aren’t there yet. That being said, their current approach is easily the best that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

Before you read this post, read my EMC World notes on SharePoint Repository Services and Content Services for SharePoint. That should help with the background.

Why SharePoint Repository Services Rocks

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EMC World 2009: Documentum ECM 6.5 Architecture Overview

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Victor Spivak, chief architect for the platform, is presenting on what is the most popular topic post from last year. Victor is smart and doesn’t mince words.  The session was mostly packed 15 minutes before it even started.

Victor is going to breeze through many of the things that haven’t changed in a year, so supplement these notes with last year’s notes.  These notes are “more accurate” if they conflict.

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The Source Code from the AIIM iECM CMIS Demo

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I’ve been promising this for a while, but it is finally available.  I had all these plans, but I decided to just get the code out for everyone as I seem to keep getting busy.  You can tell that the code was written to work and not to be supported.  All you critics can relax, I know already.

Before I go any further, I want to thank Craig Randall for his sample application that helped me get started. That application is also available on the EDN as well. Read his write-up, Consuming CMIS WSDL in Visual Studio and then go to the EDN for his code.

I also want to thank Thomas Pole for helping to write the User Interface, design the object model,  and leading AIIM’s efforts around iECM and CMIS in general.  Some of the code you will see is his.

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Content-Enabled Applications in the Age of CMIS

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Craig Randall recently posted how he was presenting on Building Content-Enabled Applications at EMC World, at least until he was downed by injury.  Regardless of his injury, this is a topic of great interest to me and I had a few conversations over the past year with him on the topic.  I wanted to chime in on his post to both amplify it and see if we can get some dialog going in advance of the conference.

What is a Content-Enabled Application?

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The Challenge of CMIS

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I started this to talk about some of the things out there, but there is sooo much that I am drawing the line. Kas is writing some good things on CMIS as he attempts to grok it.  Others, like Jon Marks, are grappling with CMIS as well. They raise some excellent points that probably deserve posts unto themselves. I find myself, today, focusing on the more immediate and of the more “outside-the-box” thoughts.

Updates and Announcements

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Upcoming CMIS Webinar

Just wanted to take a quick break to let everyone know that I will be speaking on Alfresco’s webinar on CMIS this Thursday, April 9th, at Noon EDT. Unleashing CMIS: From Federated Search to Developer Tools gives an introduction to CMIS, including some history, and then dives into the creation of the AIIM iECM Committee’s CMIS Demo.  I’ll be talking about the entire process and then showing a brief demo of the actual application.  At the end there will be a Question and Answer session.

So if you missed the talk at AIIM, or are just late coming to the CMIS party, come along and see the first multi-vendor CMIS implementation.

Register here.

How CMIS Made Me Re-Visit Visual Studio

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By now, if you are a regular reader, you know that I worked on the AIIM iECM Committee’s CMIS Demo for the AIIM 2009 Conference, Info360. If you read my initial write-up on the effort, you saw that we built the thing using .NET.  Specifically, ASP.NET for the UI and I wrote C# for the guts of the search federator. The question you may be asking is why did Pie choose to use Visual Studio 2008 when he has been living in the Java world of Documentum and open source for so incredibly long?

Well, the decision to use .NET was based on simple math. A free, reliable, IIS Server to host an application is better than paying for a server to host a LAMP stack. The other thing you may not realize is that I used to be a certifiable Microsoft developer, or is that certified? No matter…let me explain.

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