The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard is about making it easier for applications and rich content repositories to work together, regardless of the underlying implementation, language, or toolkits. Standards like CMIS are only useful when they have broad support and industry adoption. CMIS was created by well-known names in Content Management like Microsoft, Oracle, Documentum, IBM, OpenText, Nuxeo, and Alfresco. Alfresco, in particular, was one of the first vendors to offer a CMIS implementation in a production release.
CMIS is exciting for people like Metaversant, who build content-centric solutions, because:
- CMIS lessens the need for one-off integrations between applications and content repositories. Before CMIS, the content-centric application world found itself in a similar situation to client-server applications before SQL became standardized. Applications were often tied to a particular kind of back-end or relational database vendor. CMIS makes it easier for applications to work with multiple repository implementations because the application can be written against CMIS services instead of a particular vendor’s API.
- CMIS 1.1 specifies that compliant servers implement SOAP-based Web Services, AtomPub Restful, and Browser (JSON) Bindings. This means that regardless of language choice or preferred method of integration, applications should be able to talk to CMIS-compliant back-ends.
- CMIS provides a SQL-like query language based on SQL-92. If you are familiar with Documentum, think DQL. If you are familiar with Alfresco, think, “Awesome, I don’t have to fool with Lucene query syntax anymore!”. This should open the door for things like query builder and reporting tools that can work with multiple repositories.
Vendors have already begun offering CMIS implementations in their products and tools are popping up in the community. For example, Metaversant founder, Jeff Potts, developed a client-side CMIS API for Python called cmislib and contributed it to the Apache Chemistry project.
Contact us to discuss how we can help you integrate your solutions with a content management repository using CMIS today.