Andrew Chapman has provided a good summary of what we can expect from the new Content Management Interopoerability Services (CMIS) standard. I like the way he’s broken down the impact of CMIS into a series of “what’s in it for me” statements.
He’s only off on one small point. His prediction that it will take three to five years for CMIS to see the light of day in a real live production environment is off by about three to five years. John Newton at Alfresco (one of the driving forces behind CMIS) announced the world’s first CMIS integration today on his blog.
You can just tell how excited John is about the potential for CMIS to be a true game-changer in ECM. He speaks to one of the questions I’ve been mulling over; how is CMIS different than JSR-170, ODMA, WebDav and other ECM “standards”? In brief, CMIS has the backing of all of the big players in ECM from both the open source and proprietary software worlds. While this is not unprecedented it’s certainly rare, and as someone who strives to help organizations succeed with ECM I can see only good things coming from this.