The OASIS international consortium has announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) version 1.0, a new open standard that enables information to be shared across Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories from different vendors.

Advanced via a collaboration of major ECM solution providers worldwide, CMIS is now an official OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.

Using Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces, CMIS dramatically reduces the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Companies no longer need to maintain custom code and one-off integrations in order to share information across their various ECM systems. CMIS also enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems.

"CMIS makes it possible for business units to deploy systems independently and focus on application needs rather than on infrastructure considerations. With CMIS, integrating content between two or more repositories is faster, simpler and more cost-effective. This is how it should be," said David Choy of EMC, chair of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee.

"CMIS has the potential to be a game-changing standard, not only through its promise to facilitate affordable content management, but also as an enabler of whole new classes of high-value, information-rich applications that have not been feasible to date," said Mary Laplante, vice president and senior analyst for the Gilbane Group.

"At the end of the day, companies simply need better approaches to integrating systems. Business agility increasingly separates the winners from the losers, and agility is perhaps the biggest single benefit that CMIS offers."

Richard Anstey, Open Text VP, Technology and Product Strategy, said, "The approval of CMIS 1.0 is a key milestone for the industry, and congratulations go to the many individuals who worked together to make it a reality. We're now looking forward to adding CMIS to our upcoming software releases. Global enterprises are struggling with siloed deployments of diverse, unstructured information repositories. CMIS is going to be a significant accelerator in executing our vision to take away the end user pain of working around a disjointed environment of legacy ECM point solutions. In the end, this is good for customers because they will see much more powerful content applications that will help them gain value from their content across more of their systems."