A new standard aims to make it easier for third-party applications and content management systems to share information, which should allow for easier integration with social business software and collaboration platforms. However, it will be well into next year, at least, before companies can count on it.

In October, a public draft of the 1.0 specification of the Content Management Interoperability Services, or CMIS, standard was made available by Oasis, the body overseeing the effort. The public comment period runs until Dec. 22.

The only products based on the draft standard come from open source content management vendor Alfresco. Open Text is hosting a public-facing CMIS server on the Amazon EC2 platform for public development and testing. EMC has a beta implementation of the spec available for download.

While the number of vendors pledging support for CMIS is encouraging--they also include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP--companies shouldn't expect to see the spec in production until 2010 at the earliest. Most vendors likely will wait until after the public comment period and official ratification to move forward with product support.

What companies can do now is pressure enterprise content management and collaboration software vendors to support the final standard and move forward with products as soon as possible. The more access users and applications can get to content repositories, the better.