Back in December, James asked a few good questions regarding CMIS. I thought I would take a minute to answer them as best I could, with apologies for the delay. Any insight into making my answers more complete are welcome. I am only on the outside looking into the process.
Exalead
CMIS and SharePoint
This is a critical subject. As I said when the CMIS standard was released, the key to its success will be vendor adoption. This means more than just signing off on the standard. The vendors have to incorporate it into their message and start to show clients, partners, and analysts how they plan to support and implement CMIS. Based on how the ECM marketplace has begun to revolve around SharePoint, I consider Microsoft’s support a major component for success. CMIS can succeed without them at first, but it will be a much steeper hill to climb without Microsoft.
Well, Microsoft appears to be doing things right so far. In addition to showing a desire to participate in the AIIM effort (along with EMC, Alfresco, IBM, and Nuxeo), they hosted the first OASIS CMIS Technical Committee meeting out in Redmond, WA. More important than either of those actions is the implications of this MSDN article, Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007.
Word of Pie 