Wednesday 17 September 2008

Vendor support for different elements of CMIS - updated

Updated below - response to a question asked in the Webinar

So, I am currently listening to the AIIM webinar on Collaboration, and the intro from IBM, the sessions sponsors, noted something I had not picked up on elsewhere - different vendors have promised to support different elements of the CMIS standard, as in how they will implement the standards dual approaches of Web Services, or RESTful programming:


Vendors supporting both Web Services (SOAP etc) and REST:
  • IBM
  • Alfresco
Vendors supporting Web Services only:
  • SAP
  • EMC
  • OpenText
Vendors supporting REST only:
  • Microsoft
  • BEA Oracle
I for one would have thought that the BEA Oracle WebCentre (the product formerly known as BEA Aqualogic) would have supported the full web services approach ?

As I have already said, it will be interesting to see which vendors back up the rhetoric with action.

Update: I asked the IBM representative (Cengiz Satir Sr. Offering Manager IBM Enterprise Content Management) if they would push CMIS forward to get the WCM, RM and DAM issues covered. He responded that CMIS does not / is not meant to cover these complex use cases as its meant for interoperability of 'Basic Content Services'. Now, he should know what he is talking about because as he mentioned IBM has 4 members on the CMIS committee, however its quite a surprising answer to me.

Jeetu Patel of Doculabs chipped in with a comment on how broadbased interoperabilty standards initiatives can only ever get more important.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think CMIS is a great start to this thing called collaboration among ECM vendors. It seems the most "baked" compared to some of the things attempted in the past (JSR170). I think BCS type functionality will cover a large percentage of what people would need. I think components of the BCS piece (like search) will be leveraged for eDiscovery, but I think the RM stuff will remain separate, even in the future revisions, it's just to complex to mainstream it across the CMIS spec.

Anonymous said...

Dwayne,

Agreed. CMIS has a much better chance at succeeding that JSR 170. Also if you listed to the entire webcast Mr. Satir did say that the CMIS APIs can be extended to support additional/typical ECM function, but that core CMIS APIs are intended for BCS type functionality as you indicated.