This proposed standard addresses a key challenge: Over the years, organizations have deployed multiple ECM systems in different departments, and they have accumulated still more systems via mergers. Users can't easily access the content in other systems' repositories. Organizations now have enterprisewide strategies for content management, so the demand for interoperability between repositories has grown. Content management standards such as Open Document Management API (ODMA), Java Specification Request (JSR) 170, JSR 283 and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) have achieved limited adoption. Some of these standards have been too narrow while others have been too complex. Therefore, organizations must use customized adaptors or connectors to federate and consolidate ECM platforms.

CMIS is in the early stages of development, and OASIS will likely not ratify version 1.0 until year-end 2009. However, Gartner believes that the CMIS standard could succeed because:

• EMC, IBM and Microsoft have demonstrated a strong commitment and leadership. They have worked together on CMIS since October 2006.
• The contribution of Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP indicates that CMIS will receive wide support among ECM vendors.
• CMIS takes a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach and uses Web services standards, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and representational state transfer (REST), to provide options for interoperability.

ECM products will not incorporate CMIS until at least 2010. Until then, organizations will still need to use custom adaptors and connectors to make ECM systems interoperable. Even after OASIS ratifies CMIS, ECM platforms that are not SOA-enabled will not support the standard. Adoption of CMIS may be slow, and we believe the long time frame leaves a high probability of disruption.

Bron: Gartner.com