Vendors, trade press and analysts are busy promoting the new proposed technical standard CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services specification). Even though the specification is supported by significant vendors such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, my advice would be not to worry about it as a buyer until at least 2011.
Yesterday, I talked to a member in our Community of Practice who is currently looking for a new Web CMS. Our member is heading up the web department and had received a comment from somebody in IT, who urged the web manager to verify whether the short-listed vendors actually complied with CMIS.
Standards compliance is usually a good thing, but here’s why CMIS is still not relevant to buyers looking for a new web platform within the next 18 – 24 months:
- CMIS is still only a proposed standard and will take time to move through the process of becoming an approved standard
- CMIS is not implemented yet by any of the vendors in anything but experimental releases of sample code. Early adopters tend to be disadvantaged in this industry as they usually get the lion’s share of bugs and cost.
- CMIS is a standard for enterprise content management and not web content management
- You will probably change your CMS again in 3 years and by then CMIS may well be a more mature proposition
Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favour of standards, but please eliminate vendors for the right reasons when selecting a new system.
Gregory Melahn March 10th, 2009 9:23
When talking to a Web CMS vendor I think it is useful to separate the discussion on CMIS support into two discussions. The first is what their plans are for being a CMIS provider – i.e. when they will make their own content available using CMIS as the API. I agree that may be a longer term proposition, especially for smaller Web CMS vendors. But the other question is when they can can consume CMIS content. When CMIS is approved the major content vendors should have a strong interest in quickly adding CMIS as another access method and so a CMS vendor (even, or maybe especially, a small one) should be interested in being able to selectively consume CMIS (or more generally Atom accessible) content from existing ECM systems. Full disclosure: I am on the CMIS TC
David Nuescheler March 15th, 2009 9:23
Congrats to Janus for a very good write up, and to Gregory for a good comment.
Full disclosure as well: I am one of the proposers of CMIS and also on the TC serving as the JCR liaison and active in the open source implementation effort of CMIS at Apache [1].
I think it is important to be stressed that CMIS “by design” is an interoperability (least common denominator) specification for Document Management systems, hence excludes WCM (and other ECM disciplines) from its scope. I think this is a smart move to help to the TC focus.
regards,
david
(OT: I have a feeling that over time ECM has been reduced to a more modern synonym for DM, so we probably should call it “DMIS” instead
)
[1] http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/SandboxCMIS
Janus Boye March 15th, 2009 9:23
Good point, Gregory.
How difficult is it really to consume CMIS content? I mean for a system that already supports multiple data sources, e.g. XML-based content such as Atom or RSS, how much do you think it will take to add CMIS support?
As far as I can see, consuming CMIS is something that is not going to require too many engineering resources from the vendors. If you agree, then I don’t think buyers should be too concerned about lacking support with consuming CMIS content.
Cheers,
Should CMIS Impact Purchasing Now? « Word of Pie March 16th, 2009 9:23
[...] on 16 March 2009 I was reading a post by Janus Boye with the provocative premise that customers shouldn’t worry about CMIS. As you can imagine, I was shocked. When I read the post, I saw that he had some valid [...]
Laurence Hart March 16th, 2009 9:23
You make valid points, but the conclusion is only about half-right. I agree that CMIS compliance should not a determining factor in a purchase right now. That being said, people do need to worry about it.
Was going to keep it to a comment, but I expanded into a post:
http://wordofpie.com/2009/03/16/should-cmis-impact-purchasing-now/
If a WCM vendor doesn’t have a plan for CMIS, then you have to wonder about their vision. Not having a test implementation is okay, but having one shows commitment.
WCM vendors will need to support it, and not just for Gregory’s reason. If a WCM vendor can leverage an ECM repository for content, then the scale problem might go away for the WCM vendor.
More details on my post. Thanks for getting this conversation started. I think it needs to happen.
-Pie
.Sitecore » Blog Archive » CMIS, my vision March 17th, 2009 9:23
[...] JBoye just posted a blogpost(also a reaction) about what they think customers should do an not do at this moment. I agree with them to some level, but only if you include the reactions in your vision. [...]
Sitecore Fetch Squad » Blog Archive » CMIS, my vision March 24th, 2009 9:23
[...] JBoye just posted a blogpost(also a reaction) about what they think customers should do an not do at this moment. I agree with them to some level, but only if you include the reactions in your vision. [...]
Janus Boye March 25th, 2009 9:23
Yes, if everything else was equal, then I would recommend the vendor with the CMIS vision or test implementation.
However the reality in this marketplace is that everything else is never equal. The products are different, technologies are different, prices are different, user interfaces are different etc.
As long as CMIS is not even a standard, I remain unconvinced that buyers need to worry about it, as there are much more important issues that should be enough to guide their decision.
Cheers,
J. Boye » Blog Archive » 10 years with web content management - some inconvenient truths April 8th, 2009 9:23
[...] are nice, but elusive – we are really lacking standards and while eg. CMIS is an interesting initiative it is still a few years into the [...]