CMIS steps away from being officially ratified.

Irina Guseva writing at CMS Wire tells us that the CMSI draft has passed a critical milestone, getting 15% of votes, in the journey to become an officially ratified OASIS standard, read her article here:

CMIS Makes it as an official standard.

She has some quotes from Alfresco, Nuxeo, IBM and Day Software, and its an interesting little read.

This is very important for the ECM industry, but actually from my perspective even more important from an ECM / content management end user perspective. Official ratification of the standard, all out support from the industry, and baking the interoperability features into as many products as possible are a very good thing.

This will make it much more easy (and elegant ?) for SI's or internal IT departments to build systems which work exactly as the business requires, not as the vendor which meets 75% of the requirement wants them to. As you will know if you have read my blog before, the important part of ECM to me is the 'strategy' - not the vision of an ECMS as a monolithic, one size fits all solution to all your unstructured information management problems. Yet I have led procurements where ECM 'suites' from the big vendors have seemed a better solution than trying to fit together disparate pieces to build something from "best of breed" products.

CMIS promises to provide the best both worlds, a middle ground where "plug and play" comes to content management, so lets keep our fingers crossed for the continued development by OASIS and all those who have put in such a great amount of effort so far :-)

OASIS CMIS press release

Here is yesterdays OASIS press release on the formation of the CMIS technical committee:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/OASIS-Members-Form-Committee-Advance/story.aspx?guid={A42B48F4-3BCB-4225-B91F-54299FB27096}

If you scroll down there are lots of interesting little endorsement snippets from various interested vendors.

World Peace declared in ECM industry... CMIS is here ! Updated 12th Sept

Updated - I have added additional links to blog posts from Craig Randall and the Observing Content Management blog, that later notes something I had intially missed:

"The following use cases are out of scope for the initial set of deliverables:

• Records Management and Compliance
• Digital Asset Management
• Web Content Management
• Subscription and Notification Services”

So RM and WCM are not in scope yet eh ? Mmmmmm'

________________________________________________________

OK, not quite 'world peace' (wishful thinking eh?) but we must welcome the birth of a new 'standard' the Content Management Interoperability Standard or CMIS to us..... :-)

What does it mean - well I am not sure, I kept of the 'puter at home last night and only picked this up this morning via a 'press release' email from EMC, and I am still digesting it all, but of course plenty of sharper people than I have hit the pressess already, so please check out the links below:

Enter CMIS a proposed ECM-SOA standard - Pie says he is 'almost too excited for words' !

CMIS - be careful what you ask for - MMm' the Big Men On Content seem less excited than Pie...

Dogs and Cats: EMC, Microsoft, IBM, & Alfresco release CMIS - ECMArchitect

CMIS - its not JAS - Chuck Hollis of EMC

Announcing the CMIS specification - Microsoft Sharepoint Team blog

Announcing the CMIS specification - MS ECM Team blog

Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation - John Newton of Alfresco

CMIS the new lingua franca of EMC - CMS Watch

ECM standards war: bye bye JSR170 hello CMIS - Bex Huff

CMIS - Craid Randall

CMIS - Observing Content Management



The actual specification (version 0.5 full) is available from EMC developer network here:
http://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-1605

The official press releases are here:

• EMC
• Alfresco
• Microsoft
• OpenText

SAP have been mentioned too, but I can't see a press release from them anywhere.

Although CMIS appears to have been an evolutionary off shoot of the stalled AIIM 'iECM' initiative, it is being handed to the OASIS standards body for ratification as a standard. (Hopefully the other vendors will exercise constraint on MS in this one, unlike the ISO fiasco with document standards).

So, enjoy reading that lot, plenty of opinion pieces to follow I expect !