Alfresco may not have been in the original group of three Enterprise CMS vendors who developed the CMIS Specification, but they certainly are the most active when it comes to putting it to use. Today they announce a partnership with Joomlatools that demonstrates the first official integration module based on CMIS: Alfresco:Joomla!™ Integration Module.

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The module, built using the draft CMIS specification and developed in conjunction with Joomlatools, will allow organizations using both Alfresco’s content repository and Joomla’s content management system to link them together, more or less seamlessly.

Larry Cannell makes a number of good points on the Burton Group blog:

What is most interesting to think about is the flexibility this might enable. Either Joomla or Alfresco could be replaced: The Alfresco back-end could be replaced with another CMIS-compliant ECM (without changing code on the Joomla site). The Joomla front-end could be replaced with another CMIS-compliant application or website (without changing code on the Alfresco site).

From its initial announcement, Alfresco has been demonstrating a commitment to CMIS. It was the first company to release a working implementation of the CMIS specification, and just last month it introduced a CMIS developer toolbox which delivered the working prototype, sample code, and a bundle of CMIS documentation.

Ultimately, the release of the Alfresco/Joomla integration module serves equally as a tribute to the ingenuity of the Joomlatools and Alfresco teams, as well as a proof of concept for the potential of CMIS. There’s little doubt that CMIS is going to be a game changer, and by positioning itself at the forefront of the wave, Alfresco ensures itself a seat at the table and the ability to help shape the discussion in the coming months and years.

The specification, called Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), establishes how content management systems (CMSs) can use a set of Web services interfaces, as well as the REST and Atom protocols to link with other repositories. The vendors announced that it plans to submit the specs to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the standards body that oversees many Web services standards today.

“Historically content management systems were purchased for specific application uses and this led to islands of incompatible systems,” the specification states in the introduction. “The objective of the CMIS standard is to define a common content management Web services interface that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories.”

It is expected that existing vendors of content management systems will implement the specification, so that when their customers need to move a set of data from one repository to another, they will have an easy set of commands to carry out the work. Not every feature in every content management system will be replicated, and some systems will have to be retrofitted to talk with the new features, the document warns.

SMIS is built on an object model. In the parlance of CMIS Version 1, a content repository has four basic entities, called objects: Documents, folders, relationships and policies. All the objects are extensible, meaning they can be extended with new attributes. CMIS offer specifications for creating, reading updating and deleting objects. Services are also defined for filing documents, navigating the repository and querying documents within the repository

Issuing commands and transferring information across repositories will be conducted by using the Simple Object Access Protocol. A subscription service, where users can be notified when a document changes, will be carried out using the Representational State Transfer protocol.