Content Management Interoperability Services

Last night I did a presentation at Drupal for Enterprises on how to add Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to your Drupal site using the recently ratified OASIS standard - Content Management Interoperability Services, otherwise known as CMIS.

This new standard looks set to revolutionise the ECM market by providing a standard API so that your content applications can pull in content easily from multiple repositories regardless of the vendor. Backed by all major ECM vendors in the marketplace its hard to see the standard going away. Its also very well designed and easy to develop on.

Using the new CMIS module with Drupal you can now connect your ECM repository with all your documents into your Drupal site. During the presentation I gave a demo of SambaJAM, uploading and managing the documents in our workspace document library, while using CMIS to pull the documents and upload new ones in a Drupal website. This is great for Drupal as to date Drupal has never been very good at managing lots of files and documents, but is good at other things like community websites and web content publishing that ECM isn't. The two together provide a powerful combination.

We haven't published our API for SambaJAM yet, but we will in the next couple of months, and it will include CMIS. What that means is you will be able to build your own CMIS applications that pull in data from SambaJAM, Alfresco, SharePoint and other repositories using a common API. With SambaJAM, you'll be able to create a new account for free in minutes and get started avoiding the hassle of setting up and learning how to use your own ECM system. We hope that CMIS on SambaJAM will encourage even more people to develop their own custom applications on top of SambaJAM without the risk that their hard work is locked into a proprietary API.

It also means that organisations we work with will be able to plug SambaJAM easily into their existing IT infrastructure without any custom development or plugins necessary - SharePoint 2010 for example, will have a CMIS browser that will allow a SharePoint site to read and manage documents on SambaJAM with just some simple configuration.

All in all, this new standard is going to really change the dynamics of the ECM industry, just as SQL did for Databases, and as usual SambaJAM will be one of the first out there to provide this powerful new standard

Please sign up for SambaJAM here if you'd like to be involved when we open up our API soon.