ECM/DAM Standards: Choosing Those That Are Important For Your Implementation

This Content Geeks article (which is written by Nuxeo staff) considers various types of ECM standards: “Standards Matter, but Don’t Be Blind“.   This article reviews the main types and related technologies by sub-dividing them into 3 broad categorisations:

• Interoperability: CMIS specifically but also WSS (SharePoint), WebDAV and CIFS
• Metadata: XML, IKS, Dublin Core and RDF
• Non-Content Standards: LDAP, OAuth and REST

The essence of the article is while there are numerous standards available, it’s more important to grasp the significance of each to your specific ECM (or DAM) implementation and critically evaluate whether you need it or not rather than just introducing them because they exist:

“They say the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose. This may be humorous, but seasoned technologists know that, unfortunately, the quip has some truth – the world of enterprise content management is no different. There is no single standard that is more important than all others. There is no universal definition of what is most valuable; it always varies by the unique technical and business needs of the organization. Not every ECM vendor and product will support every standard. However, it is important to determine the standards that are most important for future business and technical strategy and ensure they are supported by the potential ECM platform.” [Read More]

One important issue to consider with standards is the amount of additional cost and effort involved to acquire compliance with them.  It’s not feasible to expect vendors to add support for every standard into their core platform so much depends on how widely adopted they will become and what the  consensus view is on their likely future success.  Clearly, the larger vendors have an advantage with standards as their increased resources enable them to provide support for them sooner and absorb the risk of picking a few that subsequently fail to gain acceptance.  However, smaller vendors may be able to focus more closely on the key problem you (as a buyer) are facing and directly address it, even though their product may not offer as much in terms of interoperability and standards compliance.

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