ECM vendor

Islands of Incompatible ECM Systems BE GONE!

Islands of incompatible ECM systems be gone! so say the major (IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP (an ECM vendor?), and Oracle) ECM vendors. (Would Microsoft even been known as an ECM vendor two years ago?) These vendors, who have traditionally competed for bandwidth at client sites, have come together to launch an Enterprise Content Management standards effort called "Content Management Interoperability Services" (CMIS, for short).
Once adopted and implemented, CMIS promises to make it easier to move content across disparate content repositories. It will also make it less costly and burdensome for developers to create applications that leverage Content Management repositories.
Why have competing companies decided to play nice? It could be that they've put what's good for the ECM industry ahead of fighting for market share; but it's more likely that they've come to believe that the "E" in ECM can't be fully realized (and capitalized upon) until interoperability is made possible.

I like John Newton's explanation: "The pain of not having a standard has to be big enough for people to overcome their natural tendency to protect their own turf. That comes when a critical mass has been reached in the market. With the ECM market now at $4B, you can argue that it is long overdue."  At this point, CMIS is big news primarily for ECM vendors and service providers. Companies like Pfizer, who are working to standardize on only two ECM technologies (they've chosen Documentum and SharePoint), are unlikely to cease eradicating other-ECM vendor apps (like OpenText). But two years from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now when CMIS is predicted to be as widely adopted as SQL?
According to the Proposed Charter for OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) the initial deliverables will cover:

Collaborative Content Applications

Portals leveraging Content Management repositories

Mashups

Secondary deliverables include:

• Workflow and BPM-centric applications utilizing Content
• Archival Applications
• Compound and Virtual Documents
• Electronic and Legal Discovery

And the following are currently out of scope:

• Records Management and Compliance
• Digital Asset Management
• Web Content Management
• Subscription and Notification Services

What does all of this mean to you if you don't work for an ECM vendor? That years from now working with disparate ECM systems will be easier. Should you do anything different right now? No, according to EMC's Andrew Chapman. Here's the footnote that accompanies his CMIS blog post.
"Important foot note...don't start planning anything around this just yet...the proposal needs to become a standard and then the vendors need to re-engineer their repositories, services and clients before you can take advantage of this. McNabb suggests 3 to 5 years before you'll see something to deploy. "

Posted by Brilliant Leap