What is CMIS?
There are many Electronic Document & Record Management systems out there and it's probably fair to say that the majority don't have a bulk scanning front-end to them. Certainly if they do, its not the core focus of the product so it can be 'flakey' to say the least. This is one of the reasons why products like Kofax Capture and Input Accel have excelled in the marketplace, their ability to 'front end' the process of changing physical documents to electronic is very good. This, however, has often come at a cost; release scripts are customised for each client and are different no matter which EDRM system you choose to adopt.
Whilst, as a salesman, I love the idea that a customer can part with a small fortune to customise their capture, and from then on they are tied in to me as a customer because we have written some proprietary code, the businessman in me says there has got to be a better way. I don't like proprietary and I don't like being tied to a single manufacturer for business processing, which is probably why I've enjoyed getting under the hood of a number of Open Source technologies. One phrase that I came across very early in my research was Content Management Interoperability Services or CMIS, which – to me as a specialist in the capture of documents – was very interesting.
CMIS is an open standard. The concept behind it is very simple and driven by the fact that most EDRM and ECM installations are at departmental level, so the solutions are purchased on an 'as required' basis. This has left behind a legacy of islands of data and documents which could be used by the whole enterprise but are in actual fact only accessible by individual departments. Making these individual systems talk to one another is very hard and very costly, but as time goes and technology evolves the corporate requirement is beginning to vastly outweigh the individual needs of users. As a standard, the ultimate aim of CMIS is to simplify this process of integration or interoperability. This massively reduces the costs and effort involved.
So why was I so taken by CMIS? Well, as a first step, it makes a proprietary system like Documentum or Open Text a little less proprietary. But for me, being focused on the capture side of things, it makes integration with repositories from a single point of capture much easier. It means that we don't need to write custom integrations with a number of EDRMS solutions and we can image enable current repositories, even if clients have a different one for each department with the same method of capture. This, to me, makes an awful lot of sense and relieves a large amount of pain and management from the IT department, certainly when you consider that capture is just a small part of the overall solution.
Who's signed up for CMIS? Well here's a list of some of the EDRM solutions that are CMIS compliant:
Alfresco
EMC Documentum
Fabasoft
IBM FileNet
HP Autonomy Interwoven
Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010
OpenText
As for the Document Scanning/Document Capture, as far as I know, the only company that has picked up this banner is Ephesoft. Whilst, at this point in time I think that CMIS is at a very early stage in terms of adoption and impact in the decision making process, I think in the long run it can have a big impact.
Conceptually, my ability to go to a client and say "...your knowledge workers are using Sharepoint, HR are using Documentum and Accounts are using FileNet but that actually doesn't matter too much to me as they are all CMIS compliant – I can use a single capture platform for all without writing complex release scripts..." is a pretty powerful idea and one not to be overlooked.
Recommended posts:
- The Electronic Mailroom (Part 3)
- The Electronic Mailroom (Part 2)
- The Electronic Mailroom (Part 1)
- 6 Reasons I Love Open Source Software