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.
OASIS
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.
Enter CMIS, a Proposed ECM-SOA Standard
I am almost too excited for words. Every thought I have is leading down ten different paths. You may ask why. Simple, they finally announced an ECM-SOA standard. This new standard, Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), has been submitted to OASIS for approval. This is the same standard that I initially learned about at EMC World.
Emails streamed to me all day alerting me to this announcement, and I was blissfully offline. Now I wish some people (you know who you are) had told me to pay attention this morning. As it is, I’ve decided to let everyone of you know about it and give some thoughts to the effort. I still have to review the actual specification and find out what this means to each of the key vendors.
Word of Pie 