CMIS and Content Integration Standards

Content Management Integration Services (CMIS) is rapidly becoming a hot topic in both DAM and ECM.  When released earlier this year, Open Source vendor, Nuxeo made a point of their solution’s CMIS compliance.

CMIS aims to provide integration across ECM solutions by enabling data movement between CMIS compliant systems without the need for a purpose-built connector.  An objective of CMIS is that it will do for content what SQL did for databases.

Andrew Conry-Murray of Information Week provides an overview of CMIS and explains the major benefits:

At present, CMIS focuses on two major functions: interoperability and data movement. On the interoperability front, a CMIS consumer (for example, an application) can use the specification to communicate with multiple repositories. For instance, if an insurance company has records in platforms from both Open Text and EMC, a claims-review application could be built that can pull information from both repositories and present it in a portal.

Although backed by Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, it must be pointed out that CMIS is still a draft standard and remains to be ratified.  It seems likely, however, that momentum and demand for the benefits that a standard like CMIS offers are likely to push through acceptance in some form before long.

DAM vendors who intend to compete in the enterprise market will clearly need to take note of the progress of this initiative.

Read the rest of the article at Information Week.

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