CMIS - will it be 'real' ?

One of the links in my previous post was to the CMS Watch take on the release of CMIS by their analyst Kas Thomas. His final paragraph is:

"Here's hoping IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and the others will follow Alfresco's early lead and actually implement CMIS rather than (as they did with JCR) just issue press releases about it."

Well a big 'amen' to that one !

When I was at the Open University we were using EMC Documentum as our heavy duty back end for the 'eProduction System' in other words digital asset management, collaborative team working and workflow for producing all the universities learning materials, be they destined for presentation in print, on the web, as an ebook or as multimedia.

One of the 'front ends' for presentation is the Moodle open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). However getting Documentum to talk to Moodle required some development work ("no, you don't say.....") . The developers decided to lever the architecture of JSR170, the Java Content Repository standard, which as Kas notes above, might have generated some press releases from EMC, but never actually made it as far as Documentum Content Server becoming JCR compliant. Moodle meanwhile is PHP, so there was a PHP to Documentum connector built, using JCR as a 'framework' (basically replicating calls etc). It was 'sort of' successful (?).

Now imagine if both Documentum Content Server and Moodle had been CMIS compliant or had CMIS comliant 'modules' - it would have been sooooo easy.

So this is my 'wide eyed enthusiam' posting, I truly hope all the vendors put their money where their standard is, so to speak, and actually follow Alfresco's lead by getting this into their product sets ASAP (or at least help OASIS to get a version 1.0 ratified as soon as it can).