Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog : Interoperability

CMIS Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – Public Review of Version 1.0 begins

ecmblog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:46:00 GMT

Around two-and-a-half years ago (at the AIIM conference in Philadelphia in May of 2006), my counterparts at IBM and EMC and I started discussing the need to form a group to create an open services standard for interacting with Enterprise Content Management systems (like SharePoint, IBM FileNet P8, EMC Documentum, etc.) in a uniform way. An earlier blog post explained the full rationale – but in short many customers and partners made it apparent that having to create one-off "connectors" between each application (like eDiscovery applications, Portals or Business Process Management systems) and ECM system was making it hard for customers to use more than one ECM system and for partners to build great applications that could "just work" with whatever systems a customer is using.

And now, after working with many other vendors like Alfresco, Nuxeo, OpenText, Oracle, SAP, and others on the CMIS specification, forming a Technical Committee at OASIS to deliver that specification as a truly open standard, and having four "plug-fest" events where we've tested actual (prototype) implementations of the spec together to make sure it would work in the real-world – I'm thrilled to announce that on October 23, 2009 Version 1.0 of the CMIS specification entered OASIS' public review process.

"Public Review" -- What does that mean?

Those of you who aren't familiar with the mechanics of the OASIS standards process (i.e. nearly everyone) are probably wondering what "public review" means, and how it relates to everyone's ultimate goal of having a final 1.0 specification available so that everyone can start supporting CMIS in their applications. (If you want the full details of how the Public Review Process works, you can read OASIS official "Technical Committee Process" rules – but the summary below is a bit more self-contained and user-friendly).

Public Review is one of the final stages of the OASIS standardization process –it means that the members of the Technical Committee think the spec is (almost completely) done, and that we're soliciting feedback from the general public about what changes (if any) they'd like to see in the
specification before it becomes the final CMIS 1.0 standard. The public review period lasts for 2 months – so it will continue until December 22, 2009.

Anyone can look at the spec and send us comments–I've also copied the full public review announcement below for reference.

The Technical Committee is then required to review and respond to all comments – which could include updating the specification, or responding to those comments without making a change (which we would likely do if the comment is asking for new features or big enough that it would be better deferred to a future version of the specification). If those comments result in substantive changes, then the updated spec would undergo a shorter (15-day) additional round of public review. If not, then the Technical Committee will submit the CMIS 1.0 specification (possibly with some minor clarification updates) for a final approval vote by the OASIS membership – a process which takes about a month.

Once the final OASIS approval vote is closed (assuming of course that CMIS gets sufficient votes to pass), CMIS 1.0 is (finally) an OASIS standard!

OK... so when will CMIS 1.0 be final?

Those of you keeping count from the above paragraph already figured this out – but CMIS is on track to become a final 1.0 standard sometime in the first 3 months of 2010 (exactly how soon will depend on the volume of comments we get in Public Review and the changes required to address them).

Given all of the work that the Technical Committee has done in writing & testing the spec so far, we aren't expecting to make many (if any) substantive changes – but of course if there are any issues in the spec that will hamper it’s real-world adoptability we want to hear about and address those now in Public Review, rather than waiting until the 1.0 standard is final (when making changes will require a whole new version of the specification.) So please do review the spec and give us your feedback!

When can I expect vendors (including Microsoft) to start supporting CMIS in their products?

At this point, pretty much every vendor in the ECM space is really motivated to start supporting CMIS in their respective products. We've all seen the excitement from customers about CMIS -- for example, a recent AIIM survey showed that 15% of organizations are already interested in using CMIS. (This is an unbelievable number for a standard that isn’t even final yet!)

Of course, the prerequisite for all this is a final, OASIS-ratified 1.0 standard. While several companies have released prototypes based on interim drafts (which are wonderful proof-points that CMIS is ready for real-world implementation), look for vendors to start disclosing specific plans once the specification is final.

For Microsoft's part, we announced at the ARMA 2009 Conference and at our own SharePoint Conference in the last two weeks that we are planning to deliver support for CMIS within SharePoint 2010.

Since that announcement we've gotten lots of requests for additional details ("give me an exact date!", "tell me exactly what functionality will be included", etc.) I wish that this blog post could be the place to provide more detail – but it's simply not possible at this time. Here's why -- those of you who attended the SharePoint Conference last week have seen that SharePoint 2010 is looking pretty shiny and polished. But until the CMIS 1.0 specification is final, we can't realistically commit to exact dates when our CMIS support would be ready. This means that our plans need to be flexible to balance the following needs:

Not rushing the finalization of the CMIS 1.0 specification in a way that would compromise its quality
Release CMIS support as soon as possible for SharePoint 2010 that meets the interoperability needs of our customers and partners

We're definitely looking forward to having the CMIS standardization process complete so we can lock-down our plans to the point where we can share additional details. Please stay tuned for more information.

Ethan Gur-esh,
Program Manager
CMIS Specification Editor
CMIS Technical Committee Secretary

Copy of the OASIS Public Review Announcement:

To OASIS members, Public Announce Lists:

The OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC has
recently approved the following specification as a Committee Draft and
approved the package for public review:

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0

The public review starts today, 23 October 2009, and ends 22 December
2009. This is an open invitation to comment. We strongly encourage
feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS
members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and
quality of OASIS work. Please feel free to distribute this
announcement within your organization and to other appropriate mail
lists.

More non-normative information about the specification and the
technical committee may be found at the public home page of the TC at:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=cmis.
Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person through the use of
the OASIS TC Comment Facility which can be located via the button
marked "Send A Comment" at the top of that page, or directly at:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=cmis.

Submitted comments (for this work as well as other works of that TC)
are publicly archived and can be viewed at:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/cmis-comment/. All comments
submitted to OASIS are subject to the OASIS Feedback License, which
ensures that the feedback you provide carries the same obligations at
least as the obligations of the TC members.

The specification document and related files are available here:

Editable Source:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/cmis/CMIS/v1.0/cd04/cmis-spec-v1.0.doc
PDF:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/cmis/CMIS/v1.0/cd04/cmis-spec-v1.0.pdf
HTML:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/cmis/CMIS/v1.0/cd04/cmis-spec-v1.0.html

Schema:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/cmis/CMIS/v1.0/cd04/CMIS-Core.xsd
http://docs.oasis-open.org/cmis/CMIS/v1.0/cd04/CMIS-Messaging.xsd
http://docs.oasis-open.org/cmis/CMIS/v1.0/cd04/CMIS-RestAtom.xsd

OASIS and the CMIS TC welcome your comments.

Mary P McRae
Director, Technical Committee Administration
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
email: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org
web: www.oasis-open.org
twitter: fiberartisan #oasisopen
phone: 1.603.232.9090

Announcing the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification

ecmblog — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:22:00 GMT

Today, we're excited to announce the launch of a standards effort for Enterprise Content Management systems that Microsoft has been driving with several other major vendors (IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP, Oracle) called "Content Management Interoperability Services" (or CMIS, for short).

The goal of CMIS is to define a web services standard for interacting with Enterprise Content Management systems like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet P8, etc.

Why: Integrating multiple ECM systems is hard

We've heard from many organizations that want to use SharePoint, but have other ECM systems or applications in place that they need SharePoint to work with. Often these deployments are the result of different business units that deployed different ECM systems or that were "inherited" from mergers or acquisitions, or the organization may be transitioning from one ECM system to another over time.

Having multiple ECM systems introduces integration challenges: Enterprises (rightly) want their users to be able to access and manage all content in the way that best meets their needs, regardless of which system it actually live in. For example, users want unified access to all the content they need to work with on their team site, organizations want their electronic discovery applications be able to find content and suspend its disposition across any ECM system. But in practice integrating these ECM systems is a challenge because each has its own interfaces. Even though many capabilities in each system are fundamentally similar (e.g. most ECM systems have a notion of "check in/out" & version history, and of different Content Types), and most systems' interfaces are "open" for anyone to integrate with, tying them together requires integration "connections" for every link between systems. (For example, Microsoft Search Server and Office SharePoint Server support an open "connector" model for indexing content stored in other systems - and Microsoft even provides connectors for some common ECM systems like EMC's Documentum and IBM FileNet).

This connector approach generally suffers from a few limitations:

1) Each link between systems requires a different "connection": For example, the Enterprise Search connector for IBM FileNet is different than the one for EMC Documentum, and neither one would help an organization that wants to use an IBM or EMC Search product to index content stored in SharePoint.
2) Connections tend to be "special purpose": Because today each point of integration requires additional work, most integration connectors tend to be very specifically-focused on particular scenarios. For example, while the Enterprise Search "connectors" enable Microsoft Search products to index content stored in a Documentum or FileNet system, customers who also want to browse their Documentum or FileNet content on the home page of their SharePoint portal will need to use a separate kind of connector for that (probably a Web Part).

So while today integration is technically possible, it's not as simple as it could be.

To truly make it simple for ECM systems to interoperate, we need a standard set of ECM interoperability interfaces - that way, every system could support the same interfaces and they could work together without the need for special purpose "connectors" between each pair of systems. And that's exactly what the CMIS standards effort attempts to define.

What does the CMIS specification define?

The CMIS specification defines a standard "domain model" for an ECM system - a set of core concepts that all modern ECM systems have, like Object Types (which in SharePoint we call "Content Types"), properties, folders, documents, versions, and relationships - and the set of operations that can be performed on those concepts, like navigating through a folder hierarchy, updating a document, etc.

The specification does NOT try to include all the capabilities of an ECM system - because many of these are simply too different between ECM systems. But the specification does attempt to include the fundamental concepts that are (a) relatively common across current ECM systems, and (b) enable the common integration scenarios that we've heard from customers to date.

The specification then defines how to bind the CMIS "domain model" to two different web service protocols: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the web services protocol used by many ECM systems (including SharePoint), and Atom, a newer web services model used in many "Web 2.0" applications.

You can download a preview copy of the specification here.

Who else is involved in the CMIS effort, and how long has it been going on?

Of course, this isn't a new problem, and it's not one that any one company can solve on their own. So back in 2006 Microsoft started working with IBM and EMC on the CMIS effort - since all of our organizations realized the need to enable better interoperability between our systems. Since then we've expanded the effort to include several other organizations: Alfresco, Oracle, OpenText, and SAP.

Over the last two years, this group has worked together to create and refine the specification, including validating it using actual prototype code that each company wrote on top of our products.

What's next for the CMIS specification?

The next step for the CMIS specification to become an open standard that all ECM systems can implement to facilitate interoperability is to transition its development into a public standards organization - and that's the step we're taking today. We're submitting the CMIS specification to a new CMIS Technical Committee being formed in the OASIS consortium, so that all interested parties can join the effort and continue to refine the specification into a final "1.0" version. (Click here to learn more about joining OASIS Technical Committees). We anticipate that it will take around 1 year for the OASIS Technical Committee to complete work on the final 1.0 version... but from this point onward, the exact schedule will be determined by the committee.

When will Microsoft include support for CMIS into SharePoint (or other products)?

Of course, Microsoft's goal (which is shared by all of the companies participating in the CMIS effort) is for the CMIS specification is to become the interoperability standard that we can incorporate into our products to reduce the complexity of managing & integrating multiple ECM systems... and today's announcement is an important step in that process.

As the specification goes through the OASIS Technical Committee process and approaches a final 1.0 version, we'll provide more information on when and how you'll see support for CMIS for SharePoint and other Microsoft products.

Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.