The amount of content being generated is increasing substantially due to the growth in user generated content (UGC).   This could be anything from text based content such as from blogs, forums, comments, wikis, microblogging (ie Twitter) through to media files such as images, video and audio.  This type of content is being generated by both employees and customers and is a valuable asset that companies need to manage in addition to their traditional content often generated through marketing or editorial staff.  This content explosion is also magnified by the deployment of new web sites launched to address emerging markets, lines of business or user demographics.

The reality in many organisations today is that there ends up being an increasing number of silo-ed content repositories, either using ECM packages or self developed internally.  The challenges are then around how to search across this content, reuse content across different assets, manage the content in a consistent manner and enable it to be accessed and displayed through different channels and technologies.

There have been some attempts already to try and provide consistent access to content.  One example is the Content Repository API for Java (JCR) which has had some adoption.  Of course while the Java standards are good they do restrict the adoption of the standards to those solutions based on the Java platform.

A much more promising solution lies in an emerging open standard for content access driven by OASIS.  It is the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard.  It effectively does for content what SQL did for data by providing a standard interface.  All the major ECM vendors are participating in this standard including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun and Vignette.   Standards of course live or die by their adoption so it is important to have such large players on board already with this new standard.  Open source solutions often lead the charge and help progress standards and Alfresco is leading the charge with CMIS.   The standard is currently at v0.5 and being a new standard is embracing current web service standards such as REST and JSON.

In addition to having the content repositories supporting the CMIS standard it is going to be equally important to have front end client support to facilitate easy access and rendering of content from backend CMIS compliant repositories.  Encouragingly there is already some activity in this area with several client connectors being developed.   Many of these are listed on the Alfresco wiki and include Drupal,  Joomla and Flex/Air clients.  These are not Alfresco specific but as Alfresco has progressed faster than others in supporting CMIS for their repository the CMIS clients developed have been tested against it.

So CMIS is an enabling standard to support the concept of content as a service.  As it matures and becomes widespread it will increase in adoption and help enable solutions that leverage content as a service.  These solutions could provide dashboards and management tools to help manage content across many repositories as well as tools to help monetize the access to the content.  One good example of the potential for content as a service is that of the Guardian who have opened up access to their content (including monetizing it) with their open platform.

Tagged: CMIS, content as a service, Content Management, Content Management Interoperability Services, Enterprise content management, Optaros