tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15586888.post1553348112484728860..comments2023-03-26T06:24:52.436-04:00Comments on Content Curmudgeon - Critical ECM Commentary: CMIS - EMC's role and vision for the futureContent Curmudgeon and the Green Hornet.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14713514069613953610noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15586888.post-41004089251520630692009-03-09T21:25:00.000-04:002009-03-09T21:25:00.000-04:00As a federated search provider (www.deepwebtech.co...As a federated search provider (www.deepwebtech.com), we're watching CMIS with considerable interest. Currently, a significant component of our business is devoted to developing, monitoring and maintaining connectors (the middle-ware necessary for our software to communicate with many other sources of information simultaneously).<BR/><BR/>Almost all sources of information are different in some way, and while our software does a good job avoiding the pitfall of sinking to the lowest-common denominator, it takes quite a bit of expense. And this expense is hard to justify with some clients. CMIS could definitely help alleviate unnecessary expense for our clients, provided it gains traction.<BR/><BR/>Larry.Larry Donahuehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17314424151137854095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15586888.post-89503517690174820642009-03-09T06:06:00.000-04:002009-03-09T06:06:00.000-04:00I'm pleased to find such passion about a subject t...I'm pleased to find such passion about a subject that puts most people to sleep (until they realize its implications).<BR/><BR/>More thoughts when I have more time, but my first comment re CRUD is that you have to start somewhere, and building a "wider" (more functional) bridge is very difficult. In part, that is as Choy says, due to their different security models. Finding precise equivalents to Documentum's 7 levels of security in SharePoint, for example, is not possible. It is a little bit like trying to map the colors between a Monet painting and a paint-by-numbers version of that painting.Content Curmudgeon and the Green Hornet.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14713514069613953610noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15586888.post-80023236884352227032009-03-09T01:19:00.000-04:002009-03-09T01:19:00.000-04:00Bob,I find the CMIS dialogue to be very interestin...Bob,<BR/><BR/>I find the CMIS dialogue to be very interesting and certainly think it is past time for the evolution of a consistent standard across the ECM industry.<BR/><BR/>However, I have some very sincere questions and concerns about CMIS:<BR/><BR/>1. Beyond the marketing hype, what is the real benefit for the customer/consumer? Perhaps I am being a bit naive, but I would assume that the vendors that will support the standard are engineering CMIS support into their current shipping versions (or planned new releases). Patricia states that the need for the standard evolved from the fact that most organizations (either through multiple departmental deployments or through M&A) have deployed multiple content repositories. However, how many of these repositories will actually support the CMIS standard? In my experience, what companies really struggle with (and want to integrate to) are legacy imaging and document management platforms. Unless I miss my guess, most vendors aren't going to go back to their legacy installs and retrofit them to the CMIS standard.<BR/>2. Does CRUD really go far enough? One of the more common use cases for content integration is to allow vendors to apply records management policies to content in existing ECM repositories. DOD-certified records management functionality requires more than simple search, access and retrieval. If I remember correctly, deletions need to include information overwrites and users need to be able to execute "holds" and "locks" for records. This seems to be beyond simple CRUD requirements and, again, many legacy content repositories don't support this functionality in their API sets.<BR/>3. Unstructured information is exactly that -- unstructured. Simply being able to connect to and search across a target content repository may not be enough. What ensures that the content in the remote repository is in any way "intelligible"? It's a virtual certainty that the metadata models for the "host" and "target" ECM systems are different and I think we've all had experience with full-text search results. Further, what if the target content is images or digital assets? Then, our cross-repository search results are only as good as the metadata that describes the content.<BR/><BR/>What occurs to me is that the real beneficiary of the CMIS standard is the ISV or solution provider who builds business solutions on various vendors' ECM platforms. Principally, if the ISV or solution provider develops a solution against the CMIS standard, then the solution should be able to work across various vendors' platforms. Of course, there are always nuances to how a standard is implelmented, but the CMIS standard should simply cross-platform solution development which will benefit the customer/consumer by not being forced to select a certain ECM system based on available ISV partnerships/industry solutions.<BR/><BR/>Anyway, Bob, I apologize for the long post. Would greatly appreciate it if you, or the vendors referenced above, could provide some clarity regarding any of the above.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com