Open Text Corporation, an enterprise content management vendor, pledged its support for the new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The standard's development is led by three major Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers -- EMC, IBM and Microsoft.
Recap on CMIS
CMIS is a new, open standard that will offer new ways for content applications to “talk” to content repositories. With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organize information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface. We shared our thoughts with you on why there's a need for a new industry standard. There is a number of benefits of interoperability, including:* Improved user access: Getting users the right information they need quickly. * Cost reduction: Reductions in development costs for in-house development and cost reduction for ISVs who currently create one or more connectors for each Enterprise CMS they want to integrate. * Protection of current environments: The spec is designed to work with current repositories and doesn’t require an enterprise to migrate or convert content.The big Enterprise CMS players are joined in this venture by a few more prominent Enterprise CMS providers including: Alfresco, Oracle and SAP.
Open Text's Role in CMIS
Open Text's involvement started with collaborating with SAP AG to create a prototype for the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services.As Open Text joins the CMIS party, the company's VP of technology and product strategy for ECM, Richard Anstey, gives his view on the standard: “CMIS will mean much greater flexibility, so that organizations and their users can gain more value from information, no matter where it’s stored.”Open Text hopes that CMIS will open up the world of ECM for developers to write new types of content applications that are freed from the confines of different information repositories. Ultimately, CMIS is viewed as the perfect vehicle to help decouple the user experience from the complexity of the underlying content repositories in an organization.According to Anstey, the CMIS standard will allow Open Text to leverage its content services to deliver richer enterprise content mashup applications much faster. The CMIS prototype for SAP applications is an example of how the CMIS standard can be leveraged by Open Text Content Services to expose a CMIS interface to Open Text’s own applications as well as third party applications such as those offered by SAP.
About the Author
Irina Guseva is a seasoned enterprise content technologist with 15+ years of experience, with roots in various types of media including print, radio, TV and digital media. She specializes in web content management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, digital marketing and customer experience management. Connect with Irina Guseva:
