Lou Franco's Software Business Blog : cmis, sharepoint

CMIS and SharePoint 2010 – What will it be?

loufranco — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:24:01 GMT

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.

CMIS in SharePoint 2010

loufranco — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:31:46 GMT

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.

CMS Watch Exactly Right about CMIS

loufranco — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:59:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry on the ISV perspective of CMIS, and made this statement of when I thought we could reasonably rely on it:

The current version of SharePoint doesn't support CMIS and maybe even the next one won't (no commitment yet from MS). I have to keep SharePoint specific code until we want to drop support for these SharePoint versions -- we are looking at 7-10 years from now.

Today, I read this perspective on CMIS on CMS Watch that I think is right on:

I happen to think CMIS will be a success, in part due to it's simplicity and focus. And we need to remember how success will be measured. True success will have nothing to do with the number of vendors who come out with CMIS implementations, rather it will be the number of onsite applications that use CMIS to integrate systems, that will determine success. It is also worth remembering that standards take many years before they really take hold, typically between 5 and 7, so even the most longsighted of us has no real idea as to what the future really holds for CMIS. All I know for sure is that ECM interoperability for buyers is a must have, CMIS (or something like it) is a necessity.

Ok, so we agree that it will be about 7 years. I also agree that something like CMIS is necessary, and that success is measured by how many applications are written on top of it.

To reiterate from my previous article, I think Atalasoft will have CMIS connectors in our Vizit document imaging suite for SharePoint, but that will be in addition to native connectors until CMIS is performant enough.