Up to this point there's been a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), but it takes a lot of work to take something from the proposal stage into something more concrete. As with any issue that requires broad-based consensus building, there's always the risk that two or more parties just won't see eye to eye and the whole project will go flying off the tracks.So with that in the back of my mind, it's reassuring to see real progress being made. John Newton, the CTO and Chairman of Alfresco, recently posted on his blog about the first face-to-face meeting of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee last month. Alfresco has been one of the key players in helping shape the CMIS specification, and it's fascinating to have a fly on the wall view into the process.

Some highlights from his post:

The CMIS effort so far has been use case driven with the main use cases being collaborative content management, integration into portals, mashups and search...We don't want CMIS to be so complex that you can build a records management system, but you may want to access records information for the purposes of eDiscovery...These use cases that are in-scope seem to be clear and compelling enough that we all agreed that we urgently want to get CMIS to market to get people building these applications....There was so much agreement and consensus in the meeting that we all felt it is important to meet the deadline of having CMIS complete before the end of the year.

Regardless of what the final specification looks like, CMIS is already proving to be a game changer across the entire content management industry. At the very least it's certain to make some real waves with companies whose products primarily act as middleware between disparate content management systems. For for those of us interested in watching as the CMIS specification takes shape, Newton's post is truly compelling stuff.