Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

CMIS, in its current state, seems to be best suited for document management scenarios. Hence, it was only a matter of time before a DMS vendor like KnowledgeTree jumped on the CMIS bandwagon (joining the many Web and Enterprise CMS players) and released its own implementation of the draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification.

Admittedly, quite a timely move, considering that the latest OASIS CMIS Technical Committee face-to-face meeting took place only two weeks ago, getting CMIS an inch closer to the actual standard level.

In the best spirit of interoperability, the CMIS implementation by open source document management systems (DMS) vendor KnowledgeTree is designed to follow the spec and allow ECM users to access enterprise document repositories that have a CMIS interface. The CMIS implementation for KnowledgeTree Community Edition Snapshot is available for download. The latest code can be found here.

Let’s not forget the recent CMIS Face-to-Face Meeting that took place in Colorado in the first week of August. According to Nuxeo’s Florent Guillaume, “…everybody is pretty happy with the spec as it is, and we’re nearly ready to start the OASIS review process that will first make it go through formal public review, and then open the OASIS vote for CMIS to become a standard.”

Guillaume hopes that CMIS “should be a 1.0 standard by the end of the year.” Read his Day 1 and Day 2 blogged observations.

More on CMSWire: Document Management Vendor KnowledgeTree Embraces CMIS

One of the final sessions at Gilbane SF yesterday was around content standards: CMIS, JSR-170 and JSR-283.

Many realize there are several challenges with CMIS in particular and efficiently working with content from disparate content repositories in general.

The session aimed at shedding light on some of these challenges and possible solutions in the standards space.

Too Much Content in Too Many Content Repositories

Chances are, if you’re in the enterprise content management space and you have an ECM system, this still doesn’t solve all your ECM problems. There are also document management and digital asset management systems, for example, you need to be able to “talk to.” Users of one ECM system often need to access and store documents in an entirely different content repository.

Scattered data repositories only add to the challenge. The majority of companies have an assortment of repositories, be it ERP, PLM, PDM, BI, KM, WCM, or DM systems. The problems we run into with multiple repositories are compliance, eDiscovery and business intelligence.

Add to that the fact that 80% of data is unstructured, and the enterprise world looks very gloom. Search gets harder as data sets grow. It takes longer to index. Thus, it takes longer to search.

ECM: CMIS or JSR-170/283?

Naresh Devnani, managing director at Lean Management Group, gave us a peek into real-life scenarios and impressions of implementing a standard’s wrapper, from the times when he was working for Vignette PS.

Devnani talked about implementing a JSR- 170 (the standard that was led by Day Software) level 1 functionality for an RDBMS-based web content management system.

Speaking of lessons learned, Devnani mentioned:

• Lack of ease in implementing a contained 1-n parent-child relationship
• Inefficient reference model in certain cases
• Node types not useful for WCM object wrapper
• No multidimensional view of repositories
• Big ramp-up

One of the examples at the session was quite shocking, actually. According to Devnani, some customers think of interoperability in terms of a content migration and moving things around from one repository to another. But there are still high hopes for CMIS.

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: Content Integration Standards — CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283

So, following up on the initial post, as promised. Had a good chat with Day’s David Nüscheler and Kevin Cohrane yesterday. Thanks again, guys!

Nüscheler is one of Chemistry committers and had a lot of interesting info to share. Would be nice to hear from Nuxeo and Alfresco, too… Referring you to my post on CMSWire for the rest:

The CMIS specification is still in early stages, but the buzz around it is consistently loud. Most recently, the spec has piqued interest of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), as some saw a “reference implementation” ingredient missing from the CMIS recipe for success.

Meet Chemistry — a recently-proposed Apache Incubator Project with a goal of creating a generic, open-source, Java-language implementation of CMIS.

More on CMSWire: Apache CMIS Implementation: Is There Chemistry?

This had to happen sooner or later. With all the buzz around the soon-to-be-standard CMIS and all the issues and debates surrounding the spec, it was only a matter of time before a Java giant like Day Software would do a Java-based implementation of the proposed standard.

Meet Apache Chemistry (the name is based on CMIS, as in !CheMIStry). This is a recently possibly soon to be approved Apache Incubator Project that aims to provide a Java (and possibly JavaScript) CMIS implementation framework.

What to expect:

• a high-level API for developers
• a low-level SPI close to the CMIS protocol
• default implementations of the above
• covering both the AtomPub and SOAP bindings defined in the CMIS

Day has partnered with Nuxeo (who contributed their own initial implementation) to sync and consolidate with Day’s CMIS implementation.

These are the initial sources for the Chemistry project:

• Nuxeo’s Chemistry codebase
• The JCR-CMIS sandbox components developed at Apache Jackrabbit

More details later, stay tuned!

Every effort counts. Alfresco put together a CMIS Developer Toolbox, which has some useful stuff in it along with fluffy materials like survey, white paper and Q&A. The useful parts of the toolbox, in my opinion, are:

Alfresco released the industry’s first CMIS specification draft implementation in its Alfresco Labs 3 in September, 2008, and it’s really cool of them to share it in a downloadable trial form. Alfresco just keeps on pouring more effort into Content Management Interoperability Services promotion and support.

Full article on CMSWire: Alfresco Packages CMIS Developer Toolbox

Another one bites the CMIS.

The Enterprise CMS socialism saga continues… Sense/Net, a Hungarian provider of open source alternative for building Enterprise CMS and Enterprise Portal (EPS) solutions, has implemented a prototype of the burgeoning CMIS spec.

Joining the big guns and attaching your name to a popular concept can be very attractive. Sense/Net couldn’t resist. We talked to them to get the scoop.

Full article on CMSWire: Enterprise CMS Socialism: Sense/Net Supports CMIS