Durga Apoorv Durga

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CMIS Gets a Boost

17-Feb-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Portals and Content Integration, eXo Portal , GateIn , Red Hat: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

An open source implementation of the new Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) was released last week called "xCMIS." Developed by the folks at eXo Platform,  xCMIS like Apache Chemistry, is Java based. It uses the eXo JCR (Java Content Repository) as its back-end and provides access to this via CMIS APIs. Along with a CMIS server, the project also includes a client to build applications that access content stored in any CMIS compliant repository. 

As subscribers to our Portals research know, the eXo JCR is a part of the GateIn project that forms the basis of future portal platforms from both eXo and JBoss. So if your IT landscape has a heterogeneous environment that includes these products, then this could be good news for your IT director, as xCMIS will in theory at least make it easier for both JBoss and eXo to co-exist with other products. 

However, remember that in such situations, CMIS will be much more useful if you are actually using either of them (eXo or JBoss) as a content repository, something that is not very common given that both these products typically sell as portal platforms. The other alternative is to use xCMIS directly as a content repository in your environment and expose the stored content via another portal using CMIS.

While it is too early to say how good the xCMIS implementation is (CMIS itself is not yet a ratified standard), it is a small bit of good news for CMIS proponents, since standards depend on popularity to drive adoption. 

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