Alfresco Packages CMIS Developer Toolbox

By Irina Guseva | Published Nov 19, 2008

After releasing the industry’s first CMIS specification draft implementation in its Alfresco Labs 3 in September, Alfresco pours more effort into Content Management Interoperability Services promotion and support. This time — by releasing Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox.

What’s in the Box?

The CMIS Developer Toolbox includes a working implementation and contains resources designed to assist developers in the CMIS community. The toolbox enables developers to start creating portable content applications based on the draft specification, so that when CMIS is finalized they will be ready to run with it.

The Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox provides the following resources:

CMIS Trial: A downloadable trial of the draft CMIS implementation
CMIS Sample Dashlets: Demonstrating how to use the CMIS REST API
CMIS Wiki: Home of all things CMIS, including details of the technical spec
CMIS Q&A: Covering the top ten most-asked questions about CMIS
CMIS Survey: For developers to provide feedback on their experiences with the CMIS
CMIS Forum: Participate in discussions on the evolution of the standard
CMIS Blog: Hear from an OASIS CMIS committee member on the progress of the standard
CMIS On-Demand Webinar: Discover what CMIS means to the ECM user community
CMIS White Paper: Understand the impact of CMIS on content management repositories.

Being the open source CMIS member from the very beginning, Alfresco surely has a lot of experience to share with the community and to encourage developers to learn, explore and prototype CMIS.

So, go ahead, explore and send feedback on the standard, join discussions and be part of CMIS and shape its direction — it’s all in your hands.

Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox is available here. Enjoy and let us know your thoughts about it.

Open Source CMS and CMIS

Open source CMIS devout continues to grow the community around CMIS. Alfresco was the first open source vendor to join the big guns in promoting the CMIS draft. Since then, some other open source CMS vendors, including Sense/Net, pledged their support for the new standard.

Sense/Net’s CMIS prototype was implemented on the latest version Sense/Net 6.0, which runs on .NET. Thus, making this the first CMIS prototype implementation for a pure .NET CMS. The new version of Sense/Net 6.0 sees the Content Repository featuring a CMIS-compliant interface.

CMIS Updates From OASIS

After successfully shepherding the specification through its incubation phase with Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, EMC| Documentum, Day and others, the vendors selected OASIS as a venue for advancing CMIS through the open standardization process.

Earlier this week, OASIS has formed a new group to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.

The new OASIS CMIS Technical Committee will advance a standard that uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within and between companies.

Participation in the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee remains open to all interested parties. Archives of CMIS work will be accessible to both members and non-members.

Why CMIS is Good For You

We've been talking about CMIS a lot lately. We also gave you our take on de-hyping CMIS. But, overall, we are optimistic about this standard. With CMIS, users will have much more freedom in accessing various ECM repositories sans special applications but through a common REST or Web Services API.

The specification also provides mapping to existing ECM systems. Web technologies, including Web 2.0, Internet scale, service-orientation and resource-orientation, are all exploited in CMIS. Hopefully, Web Content Management will be part of a CMIS-like standard one day as well.