Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a standard that enables interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. CMIS defines a domain model to provide a set of interfaces that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories. These interfaces consist of web services and Restful AtomPub bindings. CMIS is as important to content management applications as the standardization of SQL was to database applications. It ensures interoperability between content repositories and solutions by being independent of operating systems and architectures. The Technical Committee (TC) at OASIS is the organization that owns the CMIS spec.
Challenges of working with disparate repositories
In most organizations, business content is scattered among disparate content repositories. Many of these systems have been built using more than one technology, with some of them having a nonstandard interface and presentation framework. This presents an interoperability challenge that impacts business flexibility and also increases implementation costs.
Benefits of Content Management Interoperability Services
CMIS provides a standardized framework with a set of consistent services for executing core content and document management functions. It provides a common set of services that sit on top of the repositories and can work with any of the CMIS-compliant repositories if the presentation tier includes interfaces in REST or SOAP. This secures the investment made by organizations in their existing enterprise content management assets.
CMIS Support in Newgen OmniDocs
Newgen OmniDocs provides standard interfaces in both webservice and Restful AtomPub bindings for all mandatory services such as creating, reading, writing, deleting and searching content across repositories, as prescribed by the CMIS standards. Below are the three typical use cases supported through the Newgen OmniDocs CMIS interface.
Repository to Repository Interactions
The first use case of CMIS is Repository to Repository interaction where content repositories talk directly to each other for publishing content or providing records management services. Newgen OmniDocs extends ECM capabilities to SharePoint by mapping the SharePoint library to OmniDocs using CMIS. It enables automatic archival of documents from SharePoint to OmniDocs and extension of advanced Record Management capabilities for SharePoint content.
Federated Repository
The second use case is related to Federated Repository wherein a single application can talk to many repositories while presenting a single interface to the user. For instance, searching different repositories through OmniDocs search interface, etc.
Content Management Platform for Multiple Enterprise Applications
The third use case is where there are multiple systems like BPM/CRM/ERP talking with each, having their own repositories. Instead of using their individual repositories, these systems can use the best content application repository (OmniDocs) for the job as a shared Content Management system, thus eliminating the shuffling of content between systems.
Conclusion
The increase in complexity can only be addressed through the use of open standards that make it easy to interoperate and connect with various content repositories. In current scenarios where content can be stored in a cloud-based server and can be accessed by another application like CRM/ERP or there can be cloud based application like Salesforce which needs to access content in the local ECM system the relevance and use of CMIS standard is indispensible.
