Cms Standards News & Articles

Last week was the first face-to-face meeting of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC). From my perspective, it was a very productive gathering and allowed for a number of highly constructive discussions. In the following write-up I do my best to retrace the gist of the conversations around the topics I found most interesting, which in some cases were conversations I had with just one or two people.

The outlook from these discussions, and from the scope of the spec itself, is very positive. I believe that within a year CMIS will start to actively redefine the world of content management systems, which will be an opportunity both for big vendors who will see easier adoption of their solutions by customers concerned by lock-in or interoperability issues, and for smaller vendors whose products will be able to take advantage of a much broader spectrum of connectors to third-party systems.

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?