Unleashing CMIS: From Federated
Search to Developer Tools
Paul Hampton
Alfresco
Laurence Hart
Washington Consulting, Inc.

Agenda
What are the issues
CMIS : Who, What and Why
Details of CMIS
AIIM CMIS Demo: Who, What and Why
AIIM CMIS Demo: Live Demo
CMIS: Further Resources
Questions and Answers

Challenges of Interoperability
?? ?? ?
?
● Potentially dozens of Content Management
Systems with huge sunk cost
● Each ECM system is a silo
● Substantial operational and compliance risk to
separate repositories
● System Integrators and Software Vendors need to
write to very different APIs
● Previous standards failed to get adopted
Imaging/ Project/
ECM WCM XML
Workflow Collaboration
● Yet there is a lot of commonality
Project/
● But there is “no adoptable standard”
ECM Collaboration
Project/
WCM
Imaging/
ECM Collaboration
Workflow
Project/
Collaboration

Goals of CMIS
 The Solution:
Content Management Interoperability Services
 Create a new ecosystem for ECM
 Enable new classes of cross repo applications:
eDiscovery, Publishing, Collaboration…
 Create a common understanding of ECM:
Query, Inheritance, Properties, CRUD Versions, etc.
 To NOT expose ALL capabilities of a repository.
 To NOT expose admin/management functions.

Who is behind CMIS?
● The need for such a standard was first identified by
AIIM’s iECM Committee
● An initial proposal was drafted by EMC, IBM, & Microsoft
● Reviewed by Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP
● All built early prototype to validate the design,
and tested interoperability among them
● Draft was unveiled in Sept 2008 and donated to OASIS
● The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee was formed in
Nov 2008
● 20+ vendors are participating
● Aggressive working timeline for v1
● http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=cmis

Who will benefit from CMIS?
● Enterprise
● Unlock content without sacrificing investment
● Gain business flexibility, agility, & insight
Everybody Wins!
● Developer
● Reduce development & maintenance cost
CMIS can bring
● Increase addressable market
maturity to a
● User
fragmented industry
● More content becoming accessible
● Improve usability due to uniformity
and accelerate its
● Cheaper & more abundant applications/tools
growth!
● Repository Vendor
● Increase demand for repository technology
● Create a horizontal market opportunity

What is CMIS?

What is CMIS?
 Content Management Interoperability Services
 SQL Standard but for Content Management
 Language Independent
 Target Content Applicatoins and Collaboration
 New SQL-based query language
 Basic Operations thru AtomPub and Web Services bindings
 Simple Data Model

How does it work?
Application portability;
Interoperable Content Application
Content reuse/integration
(on any platform)
CMIS Request
Not all capabilities
A mapping of a repository are
interface; necessarily
CMIS
Not a federation exposed
(web-based, service-oriented
interface
interface)
CMIS CMIS CMIS
Implementation Implementation Implementation
Content Content Content
Repository Repository Repository
(on any platform) (on any platform) (on any platform)

Core Use Cases
 Collaborative Content Creation
 A set of users wish to work collaboratively to create one or more documents or
web pages.
 Need: Authentication, Security, Versioning
 Portals
 Aggregated interface to viewing content from multiple sources.
 Need: Query
 Mash-ups
 Composite applications that integrates data/functionality from one or more
sources.
 Need: Query, ReSTful Access (call via URL)
 Search
Support for “unified indexing” search engines

 Need: Change logs, ACL discovery

CMIS Protocol Bindings
● Web Services Binding:
● Service-oriented binding
● CMIS-specified XML schema
● Capable for system-to-system access
● Use MTOM to transfer content stream
● WS-Security 1.1, Username Token Profile 1.1
● Transactional Applications
● ReSTful AtomPub Binding:
● Resource-based binding
● Atom format with CMIS extensions
● Browse-able by standard Atom feed readers
● Suitable for ReSTful-style application-to-system access
● HTTP authentication
● Web-based Applications

iECM Demo for AIIM ‘09
● Organized by the AIIM iECM Committee
● Thomas Pole, Chair
● Betsy Fanning, AIIM Director of Standards
● Project 2 months before the AIIM Conference
● Search Federator Application
● Development led by Laurence Hart (CMIS Federator) and Thomas Pole (User
Interface)
● Use CMIS (Web Services binding) to query/access disparate,
geographically distributed vendor repositories
● Content
● Several issues of AIIM E-DOC Magazine, Infonomics Magazine, and vendor
material
● Spread across repositories
● Participating vendors
● Alfresco
● EMC Corp
● Nuxeo

How does it work?
AIIM iECM’s Search UI
(.NET)
CMIS Search Federator
(California, US)
CMIS CMIS CMIS
Implementation Implementation Implementation
Nuxeo
Alfresco Documentum
Repository
Repository Repository
(United Kingdom) (Amazon Cloud) (France)

Challenges Building the
Demo
● Hosting Challenges
● Federator hosting service
● Vendor server hosting
● Multiple Firsts
● First SOAP-Based CMIS Application
● First Multi-Vendor CMIS Application
● The 80/20 rule
● Two Months to do Everything
● Only Possible with CMIS
Most technical challenges weren’t CMIS related
●
● Nuxeo connector only took one hour to add

iECM System Demo

Alfresco’s CMIS
 First implementation based upon the 0.5 Specification
 Supports both Web Services and AtomPub protocols
 Basis for all future public APIs
 Used in integration with Drupal and Joomla
 Demonstrates Alfresco as a Content Services Platform as well as
App

Further Resources
● AIIM Demo
● http://aiim-iecm.org/
● http://aiim-iecm.org/CMISDemoe/
Questions?
● Alfresco CMIS Examples
● http://aiim.alfrescodemo.com/
● CMIS Development Resources
● http://www.cmisdev.org/