I was recently updating the Nuxeo evaluation in our Document & Records Management Research, and the biggest news here is that the open source ECM vendor has replaced its repository layer. The company has replaced its Apache Jackrabbit JCR repository with the "Nuxeo VCS" ([ Virtual Ed note: corrected] Visible Content Store) -- their home-grown repository that they claim adheres to the Content Management Interoperability Service standard.

Nuxeo claims that VCS provides better clustering, tagging, join queries, and performance improvements over it's predecessor. Performance is probably the big driver in the move away from Jackrabbit.

Repository replacements are not trivial. Just ask Alfresco web content management licensees, who recently saw their WCM repository replaced with Alfresco's DM repository. Whatever good reasons for the move, changing an ECM repository is like getting a new brain; it's going to be hard to ensure that all your memories remain intact. We were joking today in the RSG India office: could you imagine the plight of an EMC Documentum or an IBM FileNet customer with millions of documents, if the vendor decided to change their repository?

Stay tuned to our ECM Evaluation Research for a deeper dive into Nuxeo 5.4.