Content Management Interoperability Services, Good News for SharePoint?

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft, EMC and IBM announced that they agreed on a joint specification of interoperability between their content management platforms. This new protocol is called Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and it is based on SOAP, Atom and REST, all of them public and well-known. It will enable service-oriented architecture in a heterogeneous ECM environment.

What will this mean for SharePoint? Probably Microsoft will launch a CMIS-compliant connector for SharePoint that will expose its content for CMIS-capable applications and consume their content for indexing or query, as announced vaguely on SharePoint ECM blog. It will surely ease the life of a integration-project developer that juggles the information between different ECM systems (SharePoint, Documentum, FileNet…).

This new protocol also allows for rich mashups to be created while technology-agnostic (at least, in theory). The protocol also caters for security trimming and authorisation.

I’ll be tuned for the news around this new protocol. In the meanwhile you can download the draft specification yourself and take a look.