Enterprise Content Management Standard

A proposed standard interface for enterprise content management products could help organizations tie together content repositories from separate vendors and create applications for tasks such as legal discovery. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) interface could particularly benefit SharePoint customers and partners, although any benefits are still several years away.

Connecting Content Repositories

Enterprise content management products (such as Microsoft’s SharePoint Server) store documents, corporate records, and other types of content; automate business processes such as approvals; and enforce rules such as retention policies. The CMIS specification proposed by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft defines a “least common denominator” interface for such products, including a standard data model for content elements such as folders, documents, document properties, and versions; a query language based on SQL for retrieving content; and protocols based on SOAP messaging and HTTP for querying and updating content remotely.