Alfresco Offers First Implementation of CMIS in Alfresco Labs 3

By Marisa Peacock | Published Sep 11, 2008

Just yesterday, some major enterprise content management industry heavy weights — Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, announced the first ever Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft enabling interoperability across content repositories. By creating a common API, companies can develop write-once, run-anywhere, content and social applications.

As a contributing member of the draft technical specification, Alfresco is able to offer a draft implementation of CMIS for developers who can peruse and explore the draft specification. In addition, Alfresco also announced the first CMIS implementation with the latest release of Alfresco Labs 3.

In the hopes that interoperability can be delivered and enabled across applications, the draft specification hopes to standardized content repositories, just as SQL did databases.

As companies have evolved technologically, they have also been left to figure out the headache that having multiple content management systems which support individual applications and are not compatible across all systems. The dream of a write-once, run-anywhere, content application is almost a reality.

Applications based on the CMIS spec would also be able to run against and integrate content from multiple content management systems into a Portal, CRM system or Office application.

Upon the release of the planned submission of the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), Alfresco made available the following for preview:

Support for the CMIS REST and Web Services bindings allowing client applications to connect to, navigate, read and create content against the Alfresco content repository
Support for the CMIS Query Language providing SQL-like querying of the repository including location, properties, and full-text
A CMIS Test Suite to allow compliance compatibility testing against any CMIS compliant REST Binding

Facilitating this ongoing development and discussion of the draft technical specification, Alfresco plans to make CMIS webinars and tutorials available soon.

Have no doubt about it, Alfresco is excited. John Newton, Chairman and CTO of Alfresco, is confident that “CMIS will ultimately become the foundation for developing next generation content collaboration and social computing applications.”

We think it's important to note that Alfresco is the only open source enterprise CMS vendor who has been involved in the development of this new content management specification.

Stay up-to-date on CMIS:

Download Alfresco Labs’ Draft CMIS Implementation at: http://tinyurl.com/downloadcmis
Participate in the discussion about CMIS visit the Alfresco CMIS Forum: http://tinyurl.com/cmisforums
Read John Newton’s blog on CMIS: http://tinyurl.com/cmisblog