OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) as an Open Standard

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Alfresco, Booz Allen Hamilton, EMC, Magnolia, Nuxeo, Open Text, Quark, SAP, Saperion, Vamosa, Vignette, and Others Collaborate to Enable Information Sharing Across Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Repositories

Boston, MA, USA; 17 November 2008 — The international open standards consortium, OASIS, has formed a new group to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee will advance an open standard that uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within and between companies. “CMIS offers new potential for write-once, run-anywhere content,” said Mary Laplante, senior analyst at The Gilbane Group. “Companies want the best solutions for their business applications. In reality, this means multiple CM systems and the resulting need for integration. Companies still spend significant time and money connecting heterogeneous repositories. CMIS offers the promise of dramatically reduced IT burden associated with maintaining custom integration code and one-off integrations.” With CMIS, users do not need unique applications to access each ECM repository. Application development and deployment are much faster and more efficient. The specification provides easy mapping to existing ECM systems. Web technologies, including Web 2.0, Internet scale, service-orientation and resource-orientation, are all exploited in CMIS. “CMIS will help rapidly grow the industry for both vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs), while protecting customers’ investments in applications and repositories. The specification makes it possible to build applications capable of running over a variety of content management systems. This will foster the growth of a true ECM ecosystem and the overall ECM market.” said Al Brown of IBM, convener of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee. The CMIS draft specification was created by IBM, Microsoft, and EMC. After successfully shepherding the specification through its incubation phase with Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, SAP and others, the vendors selected OASIS as the most effective venue for advancing CMIS through the open standardization process. “The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee will define both a common model for content management functions, and a set of widely-usable service bindings, all based on input both from the early draft’s beta testers, and our broad international community of software developers, systems integrators, and users,” said James Bryce Clark, director of standards development at OASIS. “The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee will coordinate open standardization of the specification and promote implementation to optimize the usefulness and extensive adoption of this work.” Participation in the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee remains open to all interested parties. Archives of CMIS work will be accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS will offer a mechanism for public comment. Support for CMIS IBM “We are proud to continue this effort at OASIS with the help of the community. We are clearly putting the needs of all customers first in this important technology area. We have worked hard to develop a standard that continues IBM’s efforts to leverage the principles of SOA and Web 2.0 interfaces to benefit the industry as a whole,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. Microsoft “Customers tell us they want solutions that promote interoperability and developer innovation while expanding consumer choice, not product uniformity. CMIS embraces Web services and current ECM protocols to help customers take their content management investments to the Web 2.0 era. The new specification will address customer needs to ease the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository environments and applications,” said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of the Office Business Platform, Office SharePoint Server Group at Microsoft. Oracle “Oracle is pleased to be participating in the OASIS standards committee effort on the newly submitted Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS). The ability to access content and digital assets in an efficient and standards-based way is directly in line with the Oracle Fusion Middleware hot-pluggable strategy. CMIS will help Oracle, our customers and partners better leverage enterprise content management,” said Don Deutsch, vice president Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle. Alfresco “Content Management has needed a standard like CMIS for at least a decade. We believe CMIS will be to the ECM market what SQL has been to the database market. Major corporations today need to integrate content from multiple repositories and develop applications that can run against multiple ECM systems. With the advent of CMIS the reality of write-once, run anywhere is here at last,” commented John Newton, CTO & Co-founder, Alfresco Software. EMC “When we first began developing CMIS, our goal was to help customers dramatically reduce their challenges associated with managing multi-vendor, multi-repository IT environments. As content management is rapidly becoming a core driver of today’s business processes, companies are demanding greater levels of interoperability between diverse content sources. Today’s announcement of an official CMIS Technical Committee by OASIS is the next step in making this vision a reality,” said Razmik Abnous, VP and CTO, Content Management and Archiving Division, EMC(r). Magnolia “To us, CMIS is a logical step in the right direction. Our open-source Content Management System has been developed with the core values openness and interoperability in mind. Hence, we are extremely happy to contribute to the development of the CMIS standard, which takes interoperability to a new level in the content management domain,” said Boris Kraft, CTO, Magnolia International Ltd. Nuxeo “We warmly welcome the inception of this future standard, the perspectives are exciting. This is offering a practical solution to real-world and to the endemic Babel-Tower syndrome of heterogeneous information systems…which they all are! With the growing spread of ECM platforms and related software (search, ERP integration, etc.) in organizations, the interoperability problem and the isolation of content has become a critical issue that our customers are facing. CMIS might be a good answer to this,” said Eric Barroca, VP Operations, Nuxeo. Open Text “We see CMIS as an important catalyst for the next generation of content-driven applications. Open Text along with our partner SAP AG have already created a working prototype that uses an interface based on the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services. CMIS will offer customers a host of benefits including an improved end user experience, more robust and flexible business process automation, and a breaking down of silos of content that exist in most organizations today,” said Richard Anstey, Vice President of Technology and Product Strategy, Open Text Corporation. Quark “CMIS is an open standard that will give technology vendors, like Quark, the flexibility to work with a wide range of content management products without having to write adaptors for each system. CMIS will allow us to allocate more resources to advancing system functionality for end users with the knowledge that the new functionality works across all ECM systems that adopt the standard,” said Michael Boses, Director of XML Products, Quark. SAP “With the number of differing and dispersed content management systems in use in organizations today, it is essential for business users to have access to these solutions in one integrated system. For SAP, a leading provider of business software, and its application and integration platform SAP NetWeaver®, the support of common standards for the harmonized consumption of comprehensive ECM services by business applications is therefore important to drive better customer value. SAP is pleased to see that CMIS is on its way to becoming an OASIS standard and will play an active role as a contributor to and supporter of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee,” said Michael Bechauf, VP, Standards Strategy at the Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP. SAPERION “We are excited to join OASIS and the CMIS Technical Committee. This is another milestone in our commitment to open standards. CMIS is very similar in structure to our classic services API and presents an opportunity to extend ECM interoperability. Furthermore, it will increase independence from particular client software,” said Volker John, Director Product Management at SAPERION AG. Vamosa “Customers have always turned to Vamosa to resolve their CMS integration issues. We consider CMIS an exciting and necessary development for the industry as it will free customers from the connectivity issues arising from integration and allow them to focus on the content quality and re-use issues instead. We particularly welcome the involvement of all major players in the industry, a reflection of CMIS’ cross-platform and inclusive approach,” said Ijonas Kisselbach, Chief Technology Officer, Vamosa. Vignette “Vignette looks forward to the OASIS effort to ensure the market need for a new interoperability standard is fulfilled by CMIS, as it further affirms our philosophy of managing content where it lives and using a virtual content repository approach in the enterprise,” said Conleth O’Connell, CTO, Vignette. Additional information: OASIS CMIS Technical Committee Cover Pages Technology Report About OASIS: OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS promotes industry consensus and produces worldwide standards for security, Web services, XML conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, and other applications. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of technology. OASIS members broadly represent the marketplace of public and private sector technology leaders, users and influencers. The consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. http://www.oasis-open.org Press contact: Carol Geyer OASIS Director of Communications carol.geyer@oasis-open.org +1.978.667.5115 x209 (office) +1.941.284.0403 (mobile)