It's been an interesting two months since the announcement of the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. While some vendors rapidly got on board -- Alfresco, for example, released the first implementation of CMIS -- other companies, such as Day Software, have alternately supported and gently poked holes in the proposal.Since the Alfresco announcement, a number of other vendors have also released their own implementations, including EMC's Documentum and IBM's IBM FileNet Content Manager and Sense/Nets. No doubt there will be many more to follow.

Even with all the attention paid to the proposal, much confusion still surrounds it. Fortunately for those whose heads are still spinning, CMSWire.com's Barb Mosher posted a terrific piece last week offering a high-level overview of the proposed standard. The piece, titled De-Hyping CMIS, cuts through much of the noise surrounding CMIS, focusing on what it will mean in real-world implementations.

From the article:

Is (CMIS) the perfect solution? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact that something has been developed that ECMs and other application developers can work with to provide an integrated view of an organization's content is a step in the direction we need to go.

We all know the days of a single, in-house ECM system are pretty much over. SharePoint has already taken care of that. We need something to give us hope that our content is manageable -- regardless of where it's located. CMIS does that.

While the debate over the proposed standard will no doubt continue to smolder until it is ultimately approved (or not), it's certain to be a big part of any technical conversations on content management. In the meantime, Mosher's article serves as a good primer for the issues and controversies surrounding the proposed standard.