Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

Lars Fastrup has a round-up of the new features of SharePoint 2010. Among them is that CMIS will be supported. I’ve already blogged that Microsoft released a sample project for consuming CMIS in a document library, which has been possible for a while, so I assume that CMIS support must mean that we’ll be able to interact with SharePoint documents via CMIS.

There has been some wondering whether Microsoft could support CMIS without rearchitecting. We’ll see how it looks when it is released, but there is nothing in CMIS that Microsoft couldn’t implement with the current object model, and they have access to the underlying data model, so I have never understood what the issue is. Also, since they are one of the companies driving CMIS, it isn’t likely that they would approve of an interface that they didn’t think that they could implement effectively.

It will be interesting to see if CMIS support will be extended to the Office desktop applications. Right now, Word, Excel, etc, communicate to SharePoint via a proprietary interface, when CMIS would work just as well. If they supported CMIS then they would be able to connect to Alfresco (which already supports CMIS) and other ECM systems that will probably have CMIS by 2010 as well. Of course, there is nothing stopping those systems from implementing Microsoft’s current interface (as Alfresco and Atalasoft have done), but this would be an indication that CMIS is not just for external systems, but Microsoft is willing to build on it as well.