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.
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The Challenge of CMIS
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
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.
My Day at AIIM Expo 2009 with CMIS
Okay, let’s be clear. I didn’t travel around with CMIS all day. On the other hand, CMIS got me to the AIIM Expo this year, opened a few doors, and started many a conversation. It is amazing what standing on a soapbox for a year and a half can accomplish. It was an interesting day that was well spent and I wish I had two days at the conference. I was always rushing trying to get to see everyone and talk to everyone, and I failed. I did accomplish my primary objective, and that was a success.
How the iECM CMIS Demo for the AIIM Conference was Made
Okay, that title should handle all of the words I need for lots of hits. 🙂 In all seriousness, that title is exactly what I am focusing on in this post. I’m going to cover some of the background and non-technical challenges in putting this demonstration together so that you can better appreciate what went into the effort. You can read the official announcement for the official description.
Before I do that, I want to offer thanks to the following:
- Thomas Pole: Thomas is the chair of the iECM committee for AIIM. He was in charge of this demo and was able to identify a host platform for us to run the system on for no charge. In addition, he built the User Interface while I focused on the back-end components.
- Betsy Fanning: Betsy is the Director of Standards at AIIM. She helped keep us on track and coordinated with the various vendors that participated in this effort.
- The iECM Committee: They helped make sure that what we were doing made sense from a business perspective and worked with us to develop the requirements and design.
- The Vendors: This is more than the obvious ones. I’ll go into more details in a subsequent post. I just want to say now that all the vendors involved worked hard in this effort. Just because you don’t see their content right now doesn’t mean that they didn’t participate.
- Harris Corporation and Washington Consulting, Inc.: Thomas’s and my companies, respectively, helped us by allowing us time and additional resources to build and put our pieces together. We both have full-time day jobs and only support from our companies made this possible.
Okay, on to the show…
Should CMIS Impact Purchasing Now?
I was reading a post by Janus Boye with the provocative premise that customers shouldn’t worry about CMIS. As you can imagine, I was shocked. When I read the post, I saw that he had some valid points, but that his conclusion was only about half-right. As I started writing my response, I realized I was writing something entirely too long, so I brought it here.
Update on the AIIM CMIS Demo
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.
Answering James on CMIS
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.
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.
SharePoint and Documentum, The Need for Therapy
A while back, I talked about how Patience is a Virtue while waiting for the proper integration of SharePoint and Documentum. Andrew Chapman and the team at EMC have been working hard, and we will have what we need, at least the first step, before too much longer. In the meantime, we have choices to make, and consequences to deal with, on a daily basis.
The biggest problem right now isn’t that EMC’s solution is behind the curve. The current solution from EMC is comparable to their competitor’s offerings. The problem is that the solution is inherently inadequate. EMC knows this (which is a good thing), but until they, or anyone, gives us a better option, what do we do?
Word of Pie 