CMIS Update: A Public Review Expected Late Spring

By Barb Mosher | Published Jan 30, 2009

The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee just wrapped up their first face to face meeting at Redmond yesterday. Was it a good session? Has the scope changed? Did all those ECM guys get along? With some insight from Alfresco CTO John Newton, we got an update and help him share that update with you.

The last time we spoke of CMIS was in November. The technical committee had just been established and no meetings had been held.

Since that time, the Committee heads have been assigned:

David Choy, EMC, Chair
Ethan Gur-esh, Secretary for the data model
Al Brown, IBM, Secretary for the bindings

In addition, a wiki has been set up for working group discussions and an issue tracker has been created (mind you, I don't know how much good they are for us). But there's still not a lot of information on the OASIS site about what's been happening.

Still, the committee has met over the phone several times and finally had their first sit down in Redmond at Microsoft's cozy headquarters. Most were there in person, a few via conference call. So there must be some news to share.

Throughout the sit down, Alfresco CTO John Newton twittered about the discussions. You can follow that thread here. But he also wrote up a review of the session on his blog, so we'll just outline the highlights here.

Highlights of CMIS Technical Committee PowWow

A Use Case Driven Process: The use cases for the CMIS specification haven't really changed - web content management and records management are still out. But they did discuss needing some way to enable developers to at least access information created by applications (like Records Management), so it can be used in new applications.
Consensus on Urgency: They all agreed that it was important to get this specification finalized and out the door before the end of 2009, with a public review before the end spring.
Security: SAP presented a real world use-case focused on ACLs (Access Control Lists), a new subcommittee has been proposed and agreement is getting closer.
REST: Sounds like a good discussion on whether the REST bindings are truly RESTful (remember Roy Fieldings take on this), with a decision to call them something slightly different - maybe RESTful Atom Pub bindings. They also discussed including the WebDAV protocol and decided against it.
Reference Implementations: Discussions around the creation of an open Test Compliance Kit (TCK) and the creation of reference implementations, but the focus will continue to be on completion of the reference specification itself.
Demos Abounded: More demonstrations including IBM Quickr and CMIS, Day with JackRabbit and Alfresco Share with Joomla and Drupal.
Other Issues Discussed: Hierarchical properties, dealing with deal Aspects or Mixins (data type plug-ins) and universal search

We tried to find out if any of the other participants have provided any early feedback on the technical session, but couldn't find anything. You can expect, however, that in the coming days we will hear more about the discussions and what the participants took away from it.

The news seems good and many, we're sure, are anxious to get a look at the first public review draft. Until then take a look at what some ECM providers are doing now to work with CMIS.

Have some news on CMIS you want to share? Share it here.