Tuesday, July 28, 2009 8:24 AM
by
loufranco
CMIS and SharePoint 2010 – What will it be?
CMS Report is lamenting the lack of details of CMIS and SharePoint 2010:
While Microsoft announced their support for CMIS in September 2008 there has been little word from Microsoft on when we'll see CMIS available for SharePoint users and whether CMIS will be incorporated into SharePoint 2010.
And he’s right – Bryan gives an exhaustive list of mentions of CMIS, and they are all one-liners, rumors, or extremely vague.
SharePoint CMIS support should mean that they can interoperate with CMIS repositories (which they already can, with custom code) and that they provide a CMIS layer on top of their repository. The latter is also possible now, since anyone can deploy web-services into SharePoint and the SharePoint Object Model is already rich enough to implement CMIS. The issue with third-party solutions is that they are limited to the public interface, but Microsoft would have access to the underlying data model and would be able to do a better job, especially with queries.
For CMIS to be successful, it will need to be a first-class citizen, as I wrote when CMIS was first emerging:
[…] if [each ECM vendor’s] implementation of CMIS doesn't match their proprietary API, then we may find ourselves still writing code for each one. The main reason is that if we have competitors, and if there is a performance benefit, it will outweigh the benefits of a smaller code base. Our customers won't care if we support other systems, only what the best one for their system is. So, the more successful we are, the more likely we'll be writing ECM specific code.
Eventually CMIS will be the right way to interact with repositories, but like Bryan from CMS Report, I’d appreciate some guidance from the vendors on when the CMIS standard will be done and implemented in their products.