Quick Recap of CMIS
The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) spec was created by a group of ECM vendors -- specifically, Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Oracle, Alfresco and Open Text. The purpose of the specification is to define a common Web services interface that will allow developers to build applications that can talk uniformly to many different content repositories.
CMIS Service Oriented Architecture
The interface tells developers how to perform basic content management operations that talk to the repository. With every content repository supporting the interface, applications can be developed much easier that combine content from one or more ECM systems. The interface also enables an organization to use more than one ECM in-house, keeping them synchronized.CMIS is designed using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework. This means that applications do not have to utilize the entire set of CMIS interfaces. They can pick the ones they need to use. It also means the architecture is loosely coupled -- applications do not have to understand how the interface is implemented inside a particular ECM, they just know it will work. It is important to note that only a basic set of operations used by ECM's have been included in the interface. This "least common denominator approach" is required to ensure that most, if not all, ECM's could easily implement it.There are a number of use cases that have been identified to date for this specification; including portals, collaborative applications, mashups and searching.What this means is that more complicated functions such as records management, Web content management and digital asset management are not a part of this specification.