Industry releases content-management interop spec

A host of top software firms have developed a proposed common standard for enterprise content management.

On Wednesday, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, EMC, Alfresco and OpenText released the first draft of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. The idea behind CMIS is to get different enterprise content-management systems that may be used within an organisation to talk to each other, and to help developers create applications that can run over multiple content-management systems.

"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 EMC's chief technology officer for content management and archiving, Razmik Abnous, in Wednesday's statement. "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. Today's agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal."

Alfresco, an open-source enterprise content-management firm, has released a draft implementation of CMIS for interested developers.

"CMIS will ultimately become the foundation for developing next-generation content collaboration and social computing applications," said Alfresco's chairman and chief technology officer, John Newton, on Wednesday. "Developers can start exploring CMIS today with the draft implementation available from Alfresco Labs. CMIS will enable anyone to develop content applications on open source Alfresco and deploy them on SharePoint, EMC, IBM or OpenText."

The companies behind CMIS are now planning to submit the draft specification to the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for ratification.