Monday, 15 September 2008

EMC, IBM & Microsoft Create Web Services for Greater ECM Interoperability

EMC, IBM and Microsoft have joined forces to develop a specification which uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors.

Working together on it since late 2006, the IT giants say the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification’s ultimate goal 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 seeks to 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.

The companies intend to submit the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process.

“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. Today’s agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal.”

Key to the new specification, EMC, IBM and Microsoft worked together to define an interface that:

• Is designed to work over existing repositories enabling customers to build and leverage applications against multiple repositories -- unlocking content they already have

•De-couples web services and content from the content management repository, enabling customers to manage content independently

•Provides common web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to dramatically simplify application development

•Is development platform and language agnostic

•Supports composite application development and mash-ups by the business or IT analyst

•Grows the ISV and developer community

“We applaud EMC, IBM, and Microsoft for reaching this milestone and for choosing to take the next step and advance this important work through an open standards process,” said Laurent Liscia, executive director of OASIS.

“We look forward to furthering the evolution of CMIS from specification to standard and to promoting the broadest possible industry adoption through education and implementation efforts.”