CMIS – Too Good to Miss?

Posted on December 6, 2008
Filed Under news | 5 Comments

Background

Content is everywhere but getting to it is a different story. The amount of effort required to access content stored in multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems still takes my breath away. For example, accessing a document in Office Sharepoint and Documentum, adapting it and ultimately storing it down within IBM FileNet is non-trivial. In short, integrating multiple ECMs is hard. What tends to happen is either:

1) The customer makes do and content remains locked into a single ECM solution.

or

2) The customer invests in intricate (and brittle) solutions that span multiple ECMs.

It’s a strange position for a customer to be locked out of their own content simply because it is stored in different ECMs. But that’s where we are as an industry.

Current Solution

The sticky tape, non-collaborative, silo’ed approach to integrating multiple ECMs, is for each provider to “connect” to other ECM systems. So if your SharePoint implementation needs to view/browse content stored within Documentum and IBM FileNet then two connectors would need to be built to integrate with the respective content repositories. Connectors are integration solutions that erect a tight coupled bridge between two ECMs to enable content to flow from one system to the other.

Problem Context

Connectors solve the problem, albeit, in a very narrow and restricted manner. What happens if IBM FileNet customers what to browse a SharePoint content repository? That’s a another connector. What if we need to search as well as view/browse content? That’s another connector, possibly written by a different third-party company. Suddenly, before you know it, there is a proliferation of connectors, of varying quality, from different vendors, with wide-ranging levels of support, maintenance and release life-cycles. Welcome to the ECM connector marketplace.

To integrate is to make two disparate systems become one. An ECM connector is an integration solution. It acts as the glue between two EMC systems that tightly couples them together. The more ECM systems you integrate with, the bigger the respective whole, and the less flexible the resultant solution.

There are couple of things going on here. Firstly, the ECM has connectors to enable them to reach out to other content repositories. So in the above diagram, Sharepoint content manages can browse content in both FileNet and Documentum. However, from FileNet content managers can only search Sharepoint and the Documentum folks are restricted to browsing Sharepoint. Capitalising on the need for enable content to be accessible to the masses is the Enterprise Content Integration (ECI)marketplace. For example, if you need to a search across a specified number of ECMs, then ECI vendors provide custom content applications to achieve this.

Proposed Solution

Stop integrating through connectors and start interoperating through standards. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), pronounced See-Miss, is a specification that outlines the core operations of an ECM system. Now it is the responsibility of the vendor to expose their content repository through service-oriented interfaces. CMIS applies the 80/20 rule and purposefully does not attempt to do everything. Instead the CMIS specification focusses on defining a standard domain model and a bunch of key operations for creating, reading, updating, deleting, browsing, and querying content. CMIS is not out to replace your current EMC systems APIs. In truth, you’re still going to rely heavily on those. However, CMIS provides a standard language independent way of accessing content stored in different ECMs without the need for third party add-ons.

Now the emphasis, read as dream, is for the vendors to implement CMIS services that enable content applications to freely access content within multiple ECMs.

Status

The specification needs to be finalised and CMIS is striving to become an open standard for all ECMs. For this its turning to OASIS for ratification.

Comments

5 Responses to “CMIS – Too Good to Miss?”

  1. Nicolas on December 9th, 2008 11:33 am

    I believe we should make a difference between Content Federation and Connectors. Even if CMIS hold its promises, it’s a different story to be able to browse all external repositories from a user interface.

    The big players have to make their own repositories CMIS compliant AND they have to upgrade their product to support CMIS compliant repositories. That’s two completely different subjects…

    Today connectors normalize access to content repositories and therefore accelerate Content Integration in the organization. They allow third-party solutions or business apps to work with connected content silos.

    EntropySoft – The connector’s factory.

  2. Java Content Repository - JCR : Content for the Masses on December 11th, 2008 6:07 pm

    [...] my last post I talked about the recently published Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) [...]

  3. Shirley on December 12th, 2008 5:13 am

    I think Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is something you definitely want to look at. We specialise in this. There is more information on this at http://www.nsynergy.com or please mail to info@nsynergy.com.

  4. Sharepoint 2007 - Consultant Ready Software : Content for the Masses on December 27th, 2008 11:11 pm

    [...] is a third party market for plugins and connectors to make your dreams come true, and more recently standards for achieving this. However, you can safely say that for all but the trivial sites, you are going [...]

  5. Triano on December 31st, 2009 2:31 am

    I am impressed by the effort that went into your writing and the way you managed to keep the flow from Introduction of the topic to the summary. Do you think you might cover recent developments in marketing online or what are your thoughts about that.

    I look forward to reading more from you. Have a great week.

Leave a Reply