OASIS Approves New Version of CMIS Standard for Content in the Cloud

[gmelahn]

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) 1.1 was recently approved as a standard by OASIS.   As a member of the CMIS Technical Committee from the beginning, I’ve always had a strong interest in this standard. And since joining Alfresco last year to provide technical leadership for our ecosystem of API’s, my interest is even keener. So I was glad to see the OASIS press release this morning, highlighting the strong support this standard is already receiving in the industry. And in particular, it was great to see that the press release included a quote from our own John Newton affirming Alfresco’s commitment to open standards and CMIS.



Unlike a lot of standards that get more complex over time, CMIS is moving in the direction of simplicity. For example, with the introduction in CMIS 1.1 of a Browser Binding, now even casual developers with some HTML and JSON skills can use CMIS to integrate content with their sites and applications. Richard Esplin’s recent post about the “Beauty of CMIS”  reminded me about the analogy between CMIS and the advent of SQL which simplified the lives of developers needing to access relational databases.   In a similar way, CMIS again simplifies our lives by making it possible to access content management data without needing to learn a new API.



If you want to learn more about the new features of CMIS 1.1, Jeff Potts provides a nice summary in his blog.   You may notice that a number of the CMIS 1.1 improvements Jeff mentions are just standardizations of patterns and API’s that Alfresco introduced years ago.   For example, the introduction of ‘Secondary Object-Types’ in CMIS 1.1 is a standardization of Alfresco’s ‘aspect ‘ modeling pattern.   That’s just another illustration of how Alfresco leads the way in content management standards. And if you want to start exploring CMIS yourself, you can see lots of examples in Jeff’s latest book, “CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action”



I’m glad to see us making steady progress in the standardization of content API’s. Stay tuned to learn more about how Alfresco will leverage CMIS 1.1.

[blog_commenter]

Thanks for mentioning the book, Greg. Note that today, July 1, Manning has the book as their 'Deal of the Day' which means if you buy it today and enter 'dotd0701' at checkout you save 50%. The book is focused mostly on Java but does include some Python, Objective-C, .NET, PHP, and Android examples.

[blog_commenter]

Hi Jeff,



do you know if something has been standardized about Signle Sign On features or other ways to access to ECM leaveraging an external autentiation system?



Thanks,

Denis.

[blog_commenter]

hi Denis,  CMIS is intentionally silent on authentication, but a CMIS server can take advantage of standards-based SSO schemes (e.g. SAML) to authenticate users.