1.
CMIS in an
Interoperable World
John Newton
CTO, Alfresco
AIIM Philadelphia
March 26, 2009

2.
Alfresco is…
Open Open source, open standards
Source Built with the latest, best-of-breed open
source components
Enterprise Enterprise-scale, enterprise-standards
Content Content that runs the enterprise: Web,
Office documents, rich media, images,
records…
Management One of the most experienced enterprise
software teams in the world

3.
Agenda
History of content management

Classes of applications and problems

A bigger pie?

What is CMIS?

Why not others?

REST vs. SOAP

Which standard is it?

Before and After

What could go wrong?

What can go right?

Where does it go from here?

Joomla, Drupal, etc.


4.
Challenges of Interoperability
Up to dozens of ECM 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

Yet there is a lot of commonality

 But there is “no adoptable standard”

5.
What should a standard look like?
Maps to existing systems

Must play with major vendors systems

Fit with behavior of the underlying system

and little server logic
Learn from previous successes

Drive from real world use cases

Keep it Simple Stupid!

Build and learn


6.
Standards Timeline
1993 – ODMA

1996 – DMA

2002 – JSR-170

2005 – iECM

2005 – JSR-283

Oct 2006 – CMIS

August 2007 - Partner review begins

Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP

October 2007 - Partner review complete

December 2007 – Go to standards body

2008 – Submission to OASIS

2009 – Standard?


7.
What is CMIS?
Content Mgmt Interoperability Services

 SQL for Content Management
 Language Independent
 Target Content Apps and Collaboration
 New SQL query language
 Basic Operations thru REST and SOAP
 Simple Data Model

8.
Goals of CMIS
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.

9.
Interoperable Content Application
Application portability;
(on any platform)
Content reuse/integration
A mapping Not all capabilities
CMIS
interface; of a repository are
(web-based, service-oriented interface)
Not a federation necessarily
interface exposed
CMIS CMIS CMIS CMIS CMIS 
Implementation Implementation Implementation Implementation Implementation
DB2 Content
Documentum FileNet SharePoint Alfresco
Manager
Content & Content & Content & Content & Content &
Metadata in Metadata in Metadata in Metadata in Metadata in
Proprietary Proprietary Proprietary Proprietary Proprietary
Form Form Form Form Form
9

10.
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


11.
Use cases that can be built on top of
CMIS
Workflow & Business Process

Management
Need: Query, Reference-ability, ACL (SAP)

Archival

Need: Hi-volume ingestion

Compound/virtual documents

Need: Relationships, complex query

E-Discovery

Need: Query, Search, Hold


12.
Not This Time
Records Management

 Digital Asset Management
 Web Content Management
 Subscriptions / Notifications
 Aspects (Mixins)
 Tagging

13.
Core Concepts of CMIS
Object Types

 Object Identity
 Content Stream
 Query
 Versioning
 Folders and Hierarchy
 Relationships
 Services

14.
A Flat Schema Model for Object
Properties
CMIS-defined Properties Repository/Application-defined Properties
(Base Object Type) (Added by implementation or subtype)
Property
Property attributes:name, type, single- or multi-valued, required,
updatability, queryability, etc.
Property types: string, decimal, integer, float, Boolean, datetime,
Object ID
14

15.
Base Object Types
1 1
Source Relationship Object Type
Data Objects 1 Target 1
(not queryable,
(virtual) * not versionable)
Child
1
Document Object Type Folder Object Type
* *
Parent
(queryable, versionable, m (queryable,
1 Note:
ay have content stream) not versionable)
The relationship between
* Folder and Document is
many-to-many if
Parent
multi-filing is enabled.
Otherwise it is 1-to-many.
© Copyright 2007 by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. All 15
rights reserved.

16.
Versioning of Document Object
Each version is a Document objects that are
separate object versions of each other
(has a separate OID) (no history graph, only timestamp)
Repository
Given an OID, retrieve
• the specific version
• the current version
• all versions
Given an OID, delete
• the specific version
• all versions

Current
Version
Non-Current
Version
© Copyright 2007 by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. All 16
rights reserved.

17.
Folders and Relationships
Source Target
Object Type Name
Data Data
Object Object
A folder object
A document object
A folder containment
relationship
17

18.
Query
Syntax Semantics
SQL-92 subset + Extensions for SQL-92 + Extensions
• Multi-valued property + Relational View mapping
• Fulltext search
• Folder membership
Relational View
Table(Object Type, Type Inheritance)
Row(Object)
Column(Property)
CMIS Data Model
Object Type,Type Inheritance,
Object, Property, Content Stream,
Versioning
© Copyright 2007 by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. All 18
rights reserved.

19.
Soap vs.and REST
SOAP – Transactional Applications

WSDL and Basic SOAP Faults

 WS-Security and WS-I compliance
 Base 64 encoded and MTOM content transfer
REST – Web-based Applications

Leverage ATOM and APP

 Authentication thru HTTP protocol
 Operations: Get, Post, Put for CRUD and
Query

20.
Common CMIS Data Representation
Example:
<resultSetxmlns=quot;http://www.cmis.org/ns/cmis10quot;>
<object>
<objectType>myDocumentType</objectType>
<baseObjectType>document</baseObjectType>
<objectId>DocumentAID</objectId>
<uri>http://www.acme.com/001</uri>
<createdBy>Cornelia Davis</createdBy>
<creationDate>2007-06-30T12:29:29Z</creationDate>
<lastModifiedBy>Cornelia Davis</lastModifiedBy>
<lastModificationDate>2007-06-30T12:29:29Z</lastModificationDate>
<name>My Document</name>
<isCurrentVersion>true</isCurrentVersion>
<isCheckedOut>false</isCheckedOut>
<property name=quot;statusquot;>WIP</property>
<property name=quot;keywordquot; index=quot;0quot;>XML</property>
<property name=quot;keywordquot; index=quot;1quot;>standards</property>
</object>
...
</resultSet>
20 © Copyright 2007 by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft. All rights reserved.

21.
Sea Mist

22.
Alfresco’s CMIS
First implementation based upon the 0.5

Specification
 Supports both SOAP and REST 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

23.
A Complete, Open Source Enterprise
Content Mgmt System
Image Document
Management Management
Content
Repository
Platform
Records Web Content
Management Management

24.
Open Source Model Really Works
1.5M downloads

45,000 registered

users
30,000+ installations

90 countries, 30

languages
800+ enterprise

customers
Major banks,

governments, media
and professional
services
Industry recognition


25.
CMIS – Mash It Up!
Shared Drive Portal Web Page Mash-ups Mash-ups Mash-ups Office
URL, CMIS CMIS, HTML, JSON
URL HTML, ATOM, RSS, JSON
CMIS Dispatcher
Alfresco REST Infrastructure
Rendition
JavaScript
Services
Freemarker Templating Content
Scripting Language Model

26.
New Portlets and Apps

27.
AIIM CMIS Demo

28.
Drupal Integration

29.
Joomla Integration

30.
What Could Go Wrong?
No one adopts it

 CMIS is not a good technical fit
 A big guy decides not to adopt it
 A big guy does an “embrace and extend”
 CMIS becomes irrelevant

31.
What Could Go Right?
Remember SQL-89 and SQL-92?

 Remember the recession of 1991?
 Remember the growth of the database
industry?
 Remember client/server?
 Remember web applications?

32.
Consistent Access Regardless of
Repository
32

33.
Collaboration and Social
Networking

34.
CMIS
The new SQL for content management

 Alfresco is the first CMIS implementation
 Alfresco is open source and free to try
 Get your “CMIS on a Stick” at Booth #542
 This presentation at
http://tinyurl.com/aiimjn09