CMIS: Draft at v0.7, a Public Review Vote and WCM Potential

By Barb Mosher | Published Sep 24, 2009

Summer has come and gone and we still haven't seen a public review of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS). But while many of us have been impatiently waiting, it does appear that things have been happening.

Twitter is all a flutter with one individual tweet from enterprise content management vendor Nuxeo's Florent Guillaume (@efge):

#CMIS 0.70 soon official draft, and to be submitted for Public Review. Still on track for standardization near end of year!

The Face to Face Meeting

Yes, the CMIS Technical Committee did have their face-to-face meeting in early August. And yes, they played with sample implementations. But they also " criticized, clarified, reworded, or otherwise discussed every aspect of the spec", according to Guillaume's blog posts on the meeting.

The last time we talked about CMIS, the specification was at 0.62. But some changes were made at this session:

XML and XHTML property types are gone
The ability to use paths to get to folders was extended to documents
cmis:delete permission is gone (read the reasons on why)
Copies can now be done using the createDocumentFromSource method
Added an extension to AtomPub (cmisra:content) that allows base64 transfer of content in all cases
Added URI templates to AtomPub for quick access to a document by id

These are just a few of the changes. Read all the details in CMIS JIRA.

The Vote

Now the CMIS spec is at 0.7 and is currently under going technical committee vote to put it out to public review (pdf). At least that's what we are hearing on Twitter.

The OASIS public review process takes roughly four months. Which means that we will probably not see CMIS as an official specification before the end of this year.

John Newton, Alfresco's founder, and member of the technical committee cast his vote as "yes" for the Public Review, but also says via twitter that he thinks the end of this year is optimistic.

CMIS Will Work for WCM

While you wait for the vote to finish and the Public Review to officially start, you may want to have a look at this post by Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO of Fatwire on web content management and CMIS.

Tcherevik says CMIS is "a great protocol for integrating the WCM repository with repositories hosting external content, e.g. Amazon S3. Finally, CMIS is a great mechanism for syndicating content to widgets, portals, and such".

Is it time to ask your Web Content Management provider if they are looking at this specification too?