NetworkWorld is carrying details of a joint announcement from Microsoft, EMC and IBM about a specification that will be collaboratively developed within OASIS to deal with interoperability standards between content management systems.
The NetworkWorld story is posted here;
EMC, IBM and Microsoft have teamed up to develop a specification that will let content management systems from different vendors interact, providing greater flexibility for enterprise customers.
Using Web interfaces, a customer might use SAP’s front end to access multiple back-end content repositories, archive SAP data in Microsoft SharePoint, or use Microsoft Office or SharePoint to access back-end data inside EMC’s Documentum content-management platform.
These examples would be made possible by the new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification, which is ready to be submitted to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for approval, the specification’s developers announced Wednesday.
The Sharepoint team blog has a little more coverage of the details of the specification, including a high level diagram that shows how it might work in practice.
Finally, Ethan Gur-esh, a program manager for Microsoft’s Enterprise Content Management activity offers more detail about what the specification will provide, and why it is necessary to help with integration of today’s systems;
We’ve heard from many organizations that want to use SharePoint, but have other ECM systems or applications in place that they need SharePoint to work with. Often these deployments are the result of different business units that deployed different ECM systems or that were “inherited” from mergers or acquisitions, or the organization may be transitioning from one ECM system to another over time.
Having multiple ECM systems introduces integration challenges: Enterprises (rightly) want their users to be able to access and manage all content in the way that best meets their needs, regardless of which system it actually live in. For example, users want unified access to all the content they need to work with on their team site, organizations want their electronic discovery applications be able to find content and suspend its disposition across any ECM system. But in practice integrating these ECM systems is a challenge because each has its own interfaces. Even though many capabilities in each system are fundamentally similar (e.g. most ECM systems have a notion of “check in/out” & version history, and of different Content Types), and most systems’ interfaces are “open” for anyone to integrate with, tying them together requires integration “connections” for every link between systems. (For example, Microsoft Search Server and Office SharePoint Server support an open “connector” model for indexing content stored in other systems – and Microsoft even provides connectors for some common ECM systems like EMC’s Documentum and IBM FileNet).
For more information, or to download a preview copy of the CMIS technical specification draft, please see the website of any of the contributing organizations: EMC Corporation; IBM; and Microsoft.
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