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.