Who needs coexistence if we have Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)?
Barb Mosher, pointedly asked in a recent CMS Wire article, if CMIS will kill the Content Connector Industry. CMIS is the interoperability initiative from Microsoft, IBM and other vendors to come up with a vendor-neutrol web services interface to enable different Content Management systems coming from different vendors to talk to each other.
It is great that both Microsoft and IBM realize that "customers struggle" and "must spend valuable time and money to solve the interoperability gap" and web services interfaces are definetely the way to go. SharePoint, in fact, has been exposing for years a rich web services interface to provide access to its content repository. CMIS will indeed provide a more generic solution by defining an interface that could be implemented by any CMS vendor.
However, data access is only the first layer of a coexistence solution, what end users are requesting is an integration of features, not just an integration of data. For example, users want the ability to get an overlay of a SharePoint calendar within their Notes calendar and the ability to update SharePoint events from their Notes interface. This is much more than just data integration, it is integrating SharePoint functionality within the Notes user interface. That's the difference between Content Integration versus Data Connection. That's why we have been talking about SharePoint Integration for Lotus Notes rather than just about a Connector.
So CMIS is a step in the right direction - the easier the access to data, the better, but true coexistence requires the integration of products from different vendors as one consistent product line.
API is not enough
It is true that CMIS is focused on document repositories, and that people want more than documents integration. However, even in the area of document management, there are areas that the CMIS protocol doesn’t address. A good example is security. The following is a quote from the CMIS standard: "Authentication: It is left up to each ECM repository, the protocols used by applications to interact with the repository via CMIS services, and the applications using those protocols, to determine how the identities of users will be determined and verified. The CMIS services all assume that the repository is able to identify users through those protocols." SharePoint supports different authentication schemes, including basic, NTLM, Kerberos and Forms authentication. An enterprise product must supports all of them, and in addition provide SSO solution (for example, by using Windows SSPI). A true interoperability solution doesn’t stop with having the right APIs, it only begins there…