CMIS Support in SharePoint 2010

A certain share of the additional attention that CMIS has recently managed to pull probably originates out of the issue of the future standard’s support in SharePoint 2010. At the moment, I am not sure I know the definitive answer – accounts of the pre-announced features in SharePoint 2010 do in fact include CMIS support, but in a pretty educational post on http://blogs.msdn.com/arbindo/archive/2009/07/19/cmis-the-common-language-for-content-repositories.aspx, to my surprise, I read the following: “There is currently no news of support of CMIS in next version of SharePoint.” Interesting, but a little confusing. With the tiny and rather generic bits of information on what will form the face of the upcoming version of SharePoint, some of which are spun around to the point of blurring factual with anecdotal, it is really difficult to tell.

CMIS (the four letters stand for “Content Management Interoperability Services”, although the S is alternatively deciphered as “Specification” or “Standards”, all of which makes sense, so let there be some room for variation, although the correct one is still “Services”) is an Enterprise Content Management standard currently being developed (the latest version is 0.6-something, if memory serves me) by an OASIS technical committee with representatives from Microsoft, IBM, and EMC. The aim of the project is standardizing the existing ECM systems and thus allowing seamless data exchange within or across different content management systems, making use of SOAP REST and AtomPub.

CMIS was announced in September 2008, and although those developing the specification seem to be doing some advances towards the holy grail of 1.0, with examples of integrating the current working version of the specification emerging here and there, it is not widely covered on the web. For instance, a clipped idea of how CMIS could work with SharePoint was made available by a sample featuring the inclusion of an external repository into MOSS 2007.

Whether CMIS will be leveraged in SharePoint 2010 still remains an open issue since the standard’s 1.0 release time is still obscure – it is expected late this year. What the interested ones can do is try to grasp how CMIS works (this would probably help https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-1621) and wait until Microsoft finally unveils SharePoint 2010, i.e. up to the SharePoint conference in late October. It is neatly possible that the big announcements will arrive hand in hand.