"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.
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"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 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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