CMIS

The SQL for Enterprise Content Management

Classical and proprietary document and enterprise content management (ECM) systems are an old hat and reaching their limits. Enterprises as well as government organizations today need flexible business solutions for an efficient access to all their crucial information, no matter where it is actually stored. Backed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) all the leading vendors like IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Alfresco and many others have worked together to specify the new industry standard for Content Management.

The initial version of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) was released in May of 2010 and within less than one year more than 50 ECM-vendors made their products CMIS-ready. This broad adoption of the new open standard enables WeWebU to offer business applications providing one unified work environment for data, documents and processes independent from the underlying back end systems. Good bye, content islands!

WeWebU is an active member of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) that further develops the new standard. Since many years, WeWebU OpenWorkdesk and WeWebU Zero-Install Desktop Integration have combined data and processes from a wide range of ECM platforms in one unified, process-oriented work environment. With CMIS they are now interoperable with almost every ECM system and usable in a wide range of cross-repository scenarios. Compatibility is tested not only in the WeWebU lab, but also face to face with the leading repository vendors e.g. at the CMIS TC plugfest.

CMIS opens the floodgates for innovative, content-centric applications that can run on top of different ECM platforms. It is the most important new standard in the ECM world in decades and will be critical for any enterprise scale RFP. Many customers are very unsatisfied with their legacy ECM-infrastructure vendors and growing maintenance costs, but very often they are locked-in because of their proprietary software stack. Almost every customer aspires to the idea of CMIS to separate the investments into business applications from those into the ECM-infrastructure.

A comprehensive guide of CMIS compliant products is available from AIIM at www.aiim.org/Shop/Product/2681

We at WeWebU are convinced that CMIS will have a tremendous effect on the ECM market in the same way as SQL did on the database market 30 years ago. Some people criticize the current CMIS 1.0 as the lowest common denominator. It is correct that many proprietary API’s offer more functionalities than the ones available with CMIS today and sometimes a business application has to work around the limitations of CMIS to support different repositories. But ISVs like WeWebU are used to dealing with such limitations of open standards. CMIS 1.0 is a huge step for the ECM market and the CMIS TC at OASIS is already working heavily on the next versions of the standard. CMIS has the potential to transform the ECM industry and, today, is the best way to realize a content-centric business application which is absolutely future-proof.