Enterprise Content Management Solution Means Greater Information-Sharing and Productivity

Microsoft has collaborated with EMC, IBM, and leading software vendors Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle, SAP and Adobe, on a jointly developed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) solution. The proposed standard is designed to enable communication and interoperability between fragmented content applications.

Many companies today deal with multi-vendor, multi-data repositories to conduct their business operations. Information categories such as files, collaboration tools, e-mail systems, instant messaging systems, and databases tend to have their own unique data stores and interfaces. This reduces business flexibility and makes connecting and sharing information difficult. It also requires customers and IT departments to spend valuable time and money to maintain different enterprise content management (ECM) systems within their organizations.

Solution Allows Customers to Take Content Management Investments to New Web 2.0 Era

The CMIS standard solves this difficult business problem by leveraging existing open protocols including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the web services protocol used by many ECM systems, and Atom, a newer web services model used in many “Web 2.0” applications. It transforms the way companies share information and manage content across distributed work environments, making it easier to manage and integrate multiple propriety solutions that store business information, like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, EMC Documentum, and IBM FileNet.

Microsoft’s Commitment to Industry Standards

CMIS demonstrates Microsoft’s enhanced support for industry standards and will allow developers and independent software vendors to better interact with existing ECM systems and invent new solutions for customers by introducing a standard set of ECM interoperability interfaces. The companies have submitted the CMIS specification to a new Technical Committee in the OASIS consortium that will guide it through its rigorous standards development process and continue to refine the specification into a final “1.0” version.

Visit the Developer FAQ on the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog to learn more about support for CMIS for SharePoint and other Microsoft products.