Industry Heavy Weights Move to Standardize Enterprise Content Management

It doesn't come as a surprise that three of the major Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers — EMC, IBM and Microsoft — have been secretly developing a technical Enterprise CMS specification. Their super secret project is called the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. A fancy new acronym it is, but beyond this is it really the beginning of a brave new world for content management interoperability?

To get the scoop on this draft CMIS, and the background behind its development, CMSWire spoke with executives from the three companies.

The entire process to move to a common enterprise content management specification started back in October 2006, when EMC, Microsoft and IBM began a joint plan to propose the first Web Services standards for exchanging content with and between Enterprise CMS systems. Version 0.1 of this specification was completed in July of 2007.

Somewhere along the line, they were joined by a few more prominent Enterprise CMS providers including: Open Text, Alfresco (good to see at least one open source CMS vendor in there), Oracle and SAP.

This past August, they held a CMIS Interoperability Workshop where they demonstrated prototypes that showed their solutions would work with the specification.

Today, they pass the specification over to the OASIS open standards organization for public comment looking for final ratification of the spec by the end of 2009.

A Need for an Enterprise CMS Specifications?

To understand why anyone would want a specification like CMIS, you only need look how enterprises use content management systems today. The reality is that many typically have more than one content management solution in house serving any number of departments, teams, divisions, etc…

The problem that arises is there is no centralized repository for content, so these enterprises have to look at ways to join this content together. Options that were identified are typical today and include:

• Complete migration to a single CMS
• Purchase and implementation of one or more off-the-shelf connectors
• Federation

What the group wanted to create was a standard for sharing information stored in existing multiple repositories from different vendors, “unlocking the content they [the enterprise] already have”.

What was Wrong with the Old Standards?

There are a few standards around today such as Java standards like JSR 170 and WebDAV that could have been used to define an ECM technical standard. The problem is, not all ECM vendors support these standards. The group also didn't feel these standards sufficiently modeled the needs required for an Enterprise CMS standard.

In addition, they wanted a standard that was platform and program language neutral. Which makes sense considering core players in the standard have a mixture of languages and technologies in their individual solution.

Isn't There Already A Plan for an Enterprise CMS Specification?

This is a technical specification — unlike the planned best practice standard for ECM that is in progress between the Content Group and the British Standards Institute.

Industry Heavy Weights Move to Standardize Enterprise Content Management

It doesn't come as a surprise that three of the major Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers -- EMC, IBM and Microsoft -- have been secretly developing a technical Enterprise CMS specification. Their super secret project is called the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. A fancy new acronym it is, but beyond this is it really the beginning of a brave new world for content management interoperability?

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