Islands of incompatible ECM systems be gone! so say the major (IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP (an ECM vendor?), and Oracle) ECM vendors. (Would Microsoft even been known as an ECM vendor two years ago?) These vendors, who have traditionally competed for bandwidth at client sites, have come together to launch an Enterprise Content Management standards effort called "Content Management Interoperability Services" (CMIS, for short).
Once adopted and implemented, CMIS promises to make it easier to move content across disparate content repositories. It will also make it less costly and burdensome for developers to create applications that leverage Content Management repositories.
Why have competing companies decided to play nice? It could be that they've put what's good for the ECM industry ahead of fighting for market share; but it's more likely that they've come to believe that the "E" in ECM can't be fully realized (and capitalized upon) until interoperability is made possible.
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