John Shackleton, the CEO of Open Text has been talking up the upcoming CMIS standard in recent interviews and believes that the standard will in time be a requirement for inclusion in government tenders.

The standard, short for Content Management Interoperability Services, (we've mentioned it before here) is designed to provide a single API that can be used to access any content repository. While each vendor will retain their full featured APIs, the CMIS standard specifies a baseline of functionality such as check-out, check-in and search.

As Shackleton states, unlike previous standardisation attempts the standard has the support of most of the big players in the industry including EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. For law firms the notable exclusion is Automony/Interwoven/Worksite. Once the standard is finalised it will be interesting to see whether Worksite join the party of whether it will be up to third party developers to provide "CMIS to Worksite" interoperability.

Shackleton's inerview is here: http://www.vnunet.com/computing/analysis/2243593/open-text-hails-open-ecm

And the OASIS standard page here: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=cmis

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