Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a new set of standards and web services that ensure interoperability among disparate content repositories. CMIS promises to transform how knowledge workers and applications access and manage content among disparate repositories.

CMIS standardizes the basic operations of an enterprise content management (ECM) system, and makes them widely available as web services. As it gains popularity among application developers, CMIS has the potential to fundamentally change how content is managed and consumed, both within a corporate intranet and beyond.

A change in the way content is managed and consumed

The CMIS standard is designed to augment existing enterprise content management (ECM) systems and their current application interfaces. This provides customers with maximum investment protection for their existing ECM assets, as well as the ability to freely adopt third-party applications that leverage the standard.

CMIS focuses on the basic content capabilities of an ECM system—the create, read, write, delete, and query functions. When deployed, CMIS ensures interoperability by defining how these core content management capabilities function in a uniform manner over a variety of ECM systems.

Draft of the new specification

EMC, IBM, and Microsoft have jointly drafted Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification and have submitted it to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), in an effort to allow unprecedented interoperability with and between disparate, multi-vendor ECM solutions.