One of the details that distinguish CMIS from other standard efforts is that all major ECM vendors have built CMIS prototypes long before the specification has been ratified. It’s not surprising that most of these prototypes are repository interfaces and simple GUI clients. But an enterprise-ready client library was missing. So Open Text, SAP and Alfresco teamed up in summer 2009 to build an open source CMIS client library for Java. We called it OpenCMIS.
All three companies brought their CMIS experiences to the table. Our first CMIS prototypes go back to spring 2008. We already had experimented with CMIS clients and knew how a client library should look like. And we could also contribute proven code fragments. Meanwhile the low-level client that implements the CMIS bindings has been tested against most of the public CMIS implementations and against some that are not publicly available.
Today OpenCMIS is more than a client library. It also consists of a CMIS server framework and a set of tools. It was time for a bigger community. The OpenCMIS group proposed a contribution to Apache and has been invited to join Apache Chemistry. Finally, the OpenCMIS source code will be added to Apache Chemistry this week. We are really looking forward to this collaboration. Together we can extend and improve our code bases and foster the adoption of CMIS.
