Composite Content Applications

Looking Ahead to CMIS 1.1

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This week, over in Seattle, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee is getting together for face-to-face meetings complete with plugfests every afternoon. It promises to be fun, but they are trying to accomplish some real work during all of this. The largest piece is the thought they are giving to what is going to be in the next version of CMIS.

Now I have some definite opinions which I am going to share. In order to facilitate disagreements, I am publishing the list of items they are taking under advisement. I have added bold to the ones that I care about the most.

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CMIS 2.0, The Next Generation

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image It has been a month since I talked about CMIS, and that was focused on celebrating the release of 1.0 and the AIIM Demo.  Well, the time has come to look to the future and start thinking what we need out of CMIS to help where we need it…the future.

Short List

I’m just throwing a list of business cases that we need support for in CMIS.  Specific features may not be all listed, but I will be listing some to give an idea.  The goal here is to stimulate everyone’s collective mind and think about what we need in the next version.

  • Semantic Support: I was working with some interested parties several months ago and realized that I could force many Semantic requirements into the current model.  What was missing was the ability to query off of relationships.  This will allow for more advanced relationship management.  Mind you, more support for that management directly off of the CMIS domain model would be nice as well.
  • Records Management: Right now, you can apply policies to a piece of content.  In theory, that policy could be a retention policy.  Some enhancements to policies might be nice in order to identify RM policies versus generic policies.
  • Support for Defined Data Models: One thing that was readily apparent when building the CMIS demo was the challenges in managing the same metadata model against different repository implementations of that model.  There were variations in naming and other details.  It would be a great advantage if I could query the repository to determine if they support the needed data model and then just use it.  This happens now when you use the field “cmis:id”. It maps to the real name underneath the hood which isn’t always “id”.  For example, “r_object_id” is the actual field name for “cmis:id” within Documentum.
  • Create Content Types: Component Content Application developers, this one is for you! Leveraging off of the previous item, it would be cool if you could, through CMIS, create a new object type based upon a document or folder.  This would allow custom applications to have a generic CMIS script that would create any custom types needed by the application.  This will add an important abstraction for those using CMIS for multi-repository purposes.
  • New Bindings: Heard several ideas in the last year.  WebDAV and JSON were two.  If I had to pick one, I’d lean to the latter for creating advanced apps, though WebDAV has the distinct advantage of working well with desktop applications.  The number of overall bindings is only limited by those working on them, so get involved if you want a new one.

I’m sure that there are more, but I think those are the important ones.  It helps the web-heads, the ECM types, and the solution providers.

More on CMIS Needs

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Composite Content Applications, Dispelling the Case Management Confusion

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I’ve been working on a cool post about some positive content technology coming from EMC, but that needs more time to gel as I play with the tech, so I’m following-up with a post about where some of the focus on Case Management within EMC’s Information Intelligence Group (IIG) originated.

During Rick’s keynote at EMC World last week, he stated that Composite Content Applications (CCAs) were equivalent to Case Management.  At that point, I had my second “You gotta be kidding me!” moment of the conference.  It helped solidify the feelings in my analysis of the “strategy” at IIG.image

In later conversations, I learned that line of thought came from Gartner.  At first it was a guess, but then it was confirmed.  I decided against covering this point in my previous post because I hadn’t read the source material, and I didn’t want to accuse EMC falsely.

Well since then, I’ve gotten to read three reports on the topic, and I can say that EMC got it wrong.  The reports I read are:

Let’s look at the reports briefly, starting with the list of ten.

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EMC World 2010: The Information Advantage for Solving Today’s Business Problems

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Time for some more information gathering on the direction of the IIG group.  Rick Devenuti, the COO, is a good speaker, so it will be interesting how the messaging comes through today.

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Documentum Renewal: Application Separation

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This is the first in a series that I am writing as a Christmas present to EMC.  I want them to think about Documentum as a platform for the future and not on just adding on chunks that can be used to drive revenue.  Revenue is important, but investment now means revenue in the future.

After all, if they want their vision of SkyNet to come true, they need to get to work.

Why Web Publisher Sucks

I talked recently about how there are many ECM vendors out there that have sub-par applications, like Web Publisher from Documentum, that shouldn’t be required to be an ECM vendor.  It isn’t that they aren’t capable of writing good applications.  It is that the landscape changes faster than the release cycles for the platform.

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The 2009 Magic Quadrant for ECM

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[Note that my post on the 2010 Quadrant is now available.]

Thanks to the Documentum voters splitting their time between two topics, discussing the recent Gartner MQ for ECM is today’s topic.  The voting was an interesting little diversion that I’ll revisit later.

I’m going to talk about the report here.  The recent controversy around Gartner is a post for another day.

Staying Out of Trouble

image Last year I was threatened (my word) by Gartner for putting a copy of the MQ here.  I was also chastised for several other nitpicks. So I will only link to Oracle’s courtesy copy of the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management this year to avoid wrath.

One thing to remember is Gartner really doesn’t want you to compare a vendor’s location in the MQ from year to year. That is both well-advised and unrealistic.  To be fair, as the measurements and industry change, scores change.  Movement isn’t just dependent on vendor action, or inaction.

However, we are human and we like to perform comparisons. I have a copy to perform the comparison for my own interest.  The link I had online to last year’s report is no longer valid, so you’ll have to take my Word on it.

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