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11 Nov 2008
EMC has released a version of its Documentum platform that complies with new enterprise content management specifications known collectively as Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS).
"The [new Documentum] interfaces will address the problems of incompatible repositories," said Whitney Tidmarsh, EMC world marketing vice president, at the firm's Momentum 08 customer and partner event in Prague.
"This should reduce the cost of ownership when customers have multiple systems, as well as allowing developers to focus more on value than writing customer code."
The software is available for customers to download from the EMC Community Network.
The CMIS standard, which EMC developed in partnership with competitors Microsoft and IBM with input from Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle, SAP and Adobe, was announced two months ago with a goal to reduce the IT burden in managing multi-vendor and multi-repository environments.
Razmik Abnous, chief technology officer of EMC's content management and archiving division, said that CMIS, which was developed in a series of workshops in August, defines "a common object model" and "a series of bindings".
"All the vendors did not try and agree on all enterprise content management (ECM) functionality," he explained, adding that CMIS set specifications for capabilities including search, discovery, library services, content management and Web 2.0 collaboration, but not for functionalities such as transformational services. These will be followed up in the next version of CMIS, Abnous added.
Abnous compared CMIS to the SQL standard for database management. "Content management is big, but without a common interface the industry is not going to grow," he said. "Just like SQL went through many generations, so will CMIS. This is just CMIS 1.0."
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (Oasis) has appointed a technical committee to develop the CMIS standard.
Tidmarsh added that the standard shows the ECM market is finally reaching a certain level of maturity.
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CMIS? bring it on...
Now that OASIS has formed a committee to push the CMIS standard, some of the oldest names in the industry have finally got behind a more open approach to content management. It's great to see EMC joining in the fun. As content infrastructures grow and diversify, it's becoming clear that the way sites are managed can have a massive impact on businesses. The CMIS group is a welcome initiative. Essentially, CMIS will make web development on disparate systems much simpler. Interoperability is critical for all IT projects at the moment, particularly as heightened M&A piles more and more pressure on tech teams to sort out integration issues. CMIS removes the boundaries between content sources and management systems and gives developers more freedom to pick and choose technologies. It was time content management shook off its proprietary legacy, and became a fairer place. With the CMIS prototype module in Sense/Net 6.0, content management on .NET is freed from the constraints of SharePoint to compete on its own merits. We're sure this will be a move that is reflected across the industry. With Microsoft being hugely outnumbered by Java-based systems in the CMIS arena, it's critical that other .NET players get involved. The news about Documentum is proof that the vendor community treat this standard with the respect it deserves. Paying lip service to the interoperability issue then making minor changes to protect your own interests isn't why standards are created. CMIS will only be of value if everyone implements it in the same way.
Posted by: Tamas Biro 21 Nov 2008