But what happens if you want to move to a different CMS or portal? What do you do with all that content? The question is very complex, often very expensive, and extremely time consuming. The trouble is there is no one or simple answer.
This is why the freshly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard is so important (and why non-techies need to understand this… so attention communicators, marketers, and HR people! Spend another 30 seconds reading this as it could save you boatloads of money!).
CMIS defines a model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise Content Management repositories or systems.
“Whether it’s exploiting the value of this information, reducing the costs associated with managing it, or simply complying with various edicts regarding compliance and retention – many people think it’s the new battleground in information management,” says Chuck Hollis, VP and Global Marketing CTO with EMC (see CMIS – It’s Not JAS).
“Having a standard way to identify and manage content – the valuable stuff – could create the same kind of breakthrough that SQL did with transactional data, and XML did with web content – a standard, vendor-neutral way of moving content from application to application (CMS to CMS), and preserve important metadata.”
Chuck’s colleague, Lee Dallas, offers some caution (see CMIS – be careful what you ask for):
“It’s good for developers but make no mistake that making use of standards will benefit the vendors. It is simply easier to code to a good set of universally accepted requirements. Unfortunately they could actually hobble the efforts of the also-rans that support the spec but can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. Standards at some level work against competitive advantage and force a vendor to differentiate their product lines on capabilities that are not necessarily relevant to the core function the standard was intended to support.
I’m not saying I’m against standards - I am glad our industry is now mature enough to settle down around them. They are inevitable, necessary and a critical part of the maturation of our industry. But I wonder, did JSR 168 really break any silos for portals? It is arguable that the spec didn’t improve throughput of development either yet we all checked that box when we picked portal related products - except when it came to Microsoft.”
The CMIS technical draft specification (v0.5), announced Sept 10th 2008, has been developed jointly by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP.
In short though, I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of money on a new CMS for a few months if at all possible… and I’d be inclined to limit my purchase to something very inexpensive, or a product from one of the above vendors. Its good to see an open-source solution like Alfresco on board. I’d like to see others like Joomla and Plone follow in-step, and commercial vendors like Vignette (although they might not be around too much longer), Interwoven, Day, Sitecore, ThinPaper, Ektron, The Level, and others also sign-up.
Prescient’s own Jed Cawthorne is monitoring this issue closely and provides some running commentary on his blog. Jed points to some of the best commentary and analysis of this emerging standard in World Peace declared in ECM industry.
RELATED READING:
Alfresco has set-up a CMIS wiki for information and resources.
Use Google to see the latest CMIS related news and blog posts.
Cover Pages provides a summary of the issues.