We've always been strong believers in open standards and are proud to announce that we have recently become sponsor members of OASIS, a consortium focused on driving the definition and uptake of open standards on the web. OASIS is an incubator for a number of draft standards significant in the content management space, in particular, the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and the recently initiated Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) specifications.

There has been quite a bit of excitement about the CMIS specification of late. I think this is particularly because of the amount of momentum it is gaining, as a result of significant buy-in from a number of ECM vendors. Certainly, a well-adopted standard services interface could only make for a richer content management ecosystem, which would be nothing but great news for end-users. We believe that the benefits of the specification are clear, and that as its adoption reaches critical mass customers will inevitably begin to demand compliance from vendors.

The far younger ICOM specification has yet to receive the same amount of attention but certainly has similar potential for disruption in the collaboration space. ICOM aims to bridge the gap between the broad range of collaboration services around shared workspaces, communication, content, coordination and social networking.

What does all this mean for KnowledgeTree users?

• Seamless (and out-the-box) integration between KnowledgeTree and your existing content management infrastructure (See Drupal, Joomla);
• Federated searching among multiple KnowledgeTree repositories and other content management systems (See AIIM iECM CMIS Demo);
• A far richer set of tools and plugins integrated with KnowledgeTree (See AIR/FLEX Client, JavaFX Client);
• The combination of an open standards based interface and open source means even more peace of mind knowing that your document repository is completely future-proof.

When can we get in on the action?

We're currently implementing a CMIS (v0.61) compliant API for KnowledgeTree. For an early look, see our source code repository on GitHub. We are actively involved in the early stages of ICOM's development, so expect to hear more detail in the months to come.