Has what used to be considered a nightmare of unstructured data been
large tamed by Content Management Systems? In the following article
there is the proposition that new CMIS standards enable content (i.e.
assorted, unstructured data) to be viewed as a service in a SOA:
<<Though enterprises profess to dislike silos of any kind, they sure
seem to have trouble eliminating them. Sometimes the disease is worse
than the cure, with efforts to eliminate silos simply resulting in new
ones.
For instance, in an effort to access data contained in unstructured
sources like spreadsheets and Word docs, companies invest in
enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Yet (silo alert!) they
often end up buying and using systems from multiple vendors. If they
want these systems to be able to communicate with each other, they
have to throw lots of time and money at data integration projects.
Help is on the way, however, with a set of standards created with the
aim of making content management systems interoperable. Among the
industry heavyweights backing the Content Management Interoperability
Services (CMIS) specification are Microsoft, IBM and EMC.
The standards, which must be approved by the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), will employ
Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to link heterogeneous systems.
Because the standards will allow companies to manage content
separately from the repositories in which it is contained, they will
no longer require a separate management policy for each repository.
The use of Web services will also make it easier for third-party
vendors to create specialized applications that can run on top of
different ECM systems.
A prototype already exists, reports internetnews.com, with OpenText
and SAP partnering to use CMIS to manage content from SAP applications
with Open Text's ECM software, Enterprise Library Services. CMIS will
reportedly be applied to Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007, though a
Microsoft spokesperson stopped short of saying so in the
internetnews.com article.
CMIS also creates the interesting option of letting companies use
content as a service within a service-oriented architecture. Says
Richard Anstey, Open Text's vice president of technology and product
strategy for ECM Suite:
We believe records management should be a service that works with
other applications that don't necessarily have to manage the records
themselves. You want a single place for the policy for how long you
keep your records and, if you can expose the records and archives and
functionality as a service to be consumed by multiple applications
within the enterprise, you're doing yourself a great service.
Another clue to how this all could work is contained in a 2005 IT
Business Edge interview with CMS Watch publisher Tony Byrne. Noting
that ECM systems have traditionally been good at producing Web
services but not at consuming them, he says:
So, for example, you'll have a content management vendor who
will say, "You can extend our workflow engine and use it for your
other systems." But what they don't natively supply is [situations
where a customer] wants to swap somebody else's workflow system into
their package. I may have decided across the enterprise I want to use
this one workflow tool everywhere I've got workflow going on. And the
problem with all these systems is that they're highly integrated from
the top of the stack to the bottom, so it's hard to use somebody
else's workflow on top of their repository.
CMIS will also come in handy if more content management moves into the
cloud, as Gartner analyst Mark Gilbert believes it will. Gilbert calls
CMIS "one of the most interesting things I've seen in my 15 years as
an analyst.">>
You can read this at:
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/tve/?p=401&nr=ABG
Gervas
