CMIS is a new, open standard that will offer new ways for content applications to “talk” to content repositories. With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organise information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface. Open Text is a member of the group of companies working to develop the standard. 

According to the press release issued this week, “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 organisations to ‘talk’ to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create specialised applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems.

“CMIS will mean much greater flexibility, so that organizations and their users can gain more value from information, no matter where it’s stored,” said Richard Anstey, Vice President Technology and Product Strategy for ECM Suite at Open Text. “CMIS will open up the world of ECM for developers to write new types of content applications that are freed from the confines of different information repositories. We think this flexibility will help customers realise a true enterprise ECM strategy by giving them more powerful content application that extend across the enterprise. Ultimately, CMIS is the perfect vehicle to help decouple the user experience from the complexity of the underlying content repositories in an organisation.”

According to Anstey, the CMIS standard will allow Open Text to leverage its content services to deliver richer enterprise content mashup applications much faster. The CMIS prototype for SAP applications is an example of how the CMIS standard can be leveraged by Open Text Content Services to expose a CMIS interface to Open Text’s own applications as well as third party applications such as those offered by SAP.

CMIS is being submitted today for acceptance as an OASIS standard (www.oasis-open.org/). OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.