Making content work for the enterprise

September 16, 2008: The ability for enterprise applications to interact seamlessly with a variety of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories is being promised by a new standards initiative.

EMC, IBM and Microsoft have announced a jointly developed specification which uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to accomplish the task

The companies intend to submit the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification to OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).

The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to “talk” to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems.

Working together since late 2006, the three companies were joined in the creation of the CMIS draft specification by other leading software providers including: Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle and SAP. A final gathering of all seven companies was recently held to validate interoperability of the specification before submission to OASIS.“For some time now the world of content management has been evolving from separate application platforms to an integral part of a company’s information infrastructure,” said Razmik Abnous, vice president and chief technology officer, Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC.

“As content management rapidly becomes a key piece of a company’s business process, there’s a heightened need for interoperability between the vast and diverse sources that manage this content.”

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