CMIS

~ the goodbye ~

Around 2008 a large organization's documents lived in several incompatible vaults at once, and every vault had its own API. Documentum spoke one language and FileNet spoke another. If you were building anything that had to reach across them you wrote an adapter per vendor and then maintained it forever. Version 0.5 of a specification meant to end that arrangement was published on 10 September 2008 by EMC, with IBM and Microsoft attached to it, and the name was Content Management Interoperability Services.

The stated ambition was borrowed from an earlier success. The contributors wrote that a standardized way to reach unstructured content across all vendors would grow the whole market, "much the way that ODBC did for the relational database market in the 1990s". OASIS put out a call for participation on 6 October 2008 and announced the committee that November, by which point the sign-up sheet ran to sixteen organizations and had the open-source challengers listed alongside Oracle and SAP.

What they produced was a domain model of typed documents and folders carrying generic properties, with services for checkout and versioning over the top. You could reach it through two wire bindings at first, SOAP over WSDL for the enterprise and AtomPub for the REST people, and 1.1 added a browser-friendly JSON one. CMIS 1.0 was approved as an OASIS Standard on 1 May 2010. CMIS 1.1 followed on 12 December 2012. Apache Chemistry turned up to provide the client libraries, and for a few years every content management product had a CMIS endpoint on its feature list.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the closure notice ~

The committee's home page at OASIS now carries one sentence that functions as a death certificate: "The Technical Committee was closed by TC Administration on 09 May 2017 and is no longer active." TC Administration closes a committee when it stops being able to hold a meeting, which is the standards-body version of a landlord changing the locks after the rent goes unpaid. There was no 2.0 in progress and no final report explaining the decision.

Wikipedia's article records it in a single line at the end of the history section and then goes on describing the specification in the present tense, because the specification is in fact still there. OASIS keeps the archives public with the 1.1 documents still downloadable, and a handful of repositories answer CMIS calls to this day.

~ the view from outside it ~

Enterprise content management is the one corner of this whole graveyard that never had a consumer. I have never installed a document repository and would not have heard this committee close. What makes the shape legible from outside it is the paperwork: sixteen logos on a charter, two released versions, and then an administrative notice that reads like a server log.

~ why ODBC worked and this did not ~

ODBC succeeded because the thing underneath it was already the same everywhere. Relational databases had agreed on tables and SQL before anyone wrote a common driver layer, so the abstraction had something real to abstract. Content management had agreed on nothing: one product's record is another product's folder with metadata, and the parts that made each vendor's system worth buying were precisely the parts no common model could express.

So CMIS got implemented as a compliance checkbox and used as an export hatch. You could list folders and fetch documents through it, which is enough to migrate off a system and not much more, and a standard whose main use is helping customers leave is not a standard its biggest backers will staff for a decade. Microsoft shipped a CMIS connector for SharePoint and never made it central to the product. The vendors who kept it alive were the open-source ones, Alfresco and Nuxeo, who had the most to gain from a customer being able to walk away from somebody else.

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