A couple of weeks ago with the beginning of the CMIS plug fest in Basel Open Text made the first CMIS implementation available for public tests. It is the intent of the CMIS Technical Committee to improve and settle the standard by running continuous interoperability tests between the various vendors and their implementations. Anyone who is interested can get an account and run his code against the available AtomPub and SOAP end-points. This helps in identifying different interpretations of the standard, detect incompleteness or areas for other improvements. Many of the active members in the standardization group use it already and others have followed this idea or will follow making their services public. Additional activities take place during the regular face-to-face meetings (called PlugFest) that allow quick direct interactions between the parties to identify and track issues.
We have chosen to host the public CMIS server in the Amazon EC2 computing cloud. This platform provides us the flexibility to quickly setup, upgrade/modify and shut-down the service on demand. Getting familiar with the infrastructure and installing the first virtual machine was a real pain. But now it appears to be a reliable and stable platform.
Today this is mainly for development and testing purposes. However, these first steps towards cloud computing also give some insight into the future of cloud computing services. You can easily imagine CMIS standard test clients being replaced by real customers connecting to the Enterprise Library Web Services from their SAP system, SharePoint or other applications. Without the need to buy and maintain your own hardware, without the need to take care about a 24×7 availability for your servers you get the ability to come much faster to productive systems and you can scale on demand your server landscape. You can still benefit from the feature set that the Open Text server provides such as single-instance-archiving, compression or encryption of content. You can use your own private storage volume in the cloud (Amazon S3 storage or Microsoft Azure) and organize the content according to your business needs. You can use Retention Management, benefit from the DoD certified Records Management facilities, automated backups and so on and so on. There is potential for having pre-configured appliances for certain business-cases and for service providers to offer added value on top of an existing base. So there are a lot of opportunities in cloud computing and you can start today if you want. The CMIS server is up and running.
If you are interested in accessing our CMIS test server, just drop us a line: cmis@opentext.com
Posted by jhuebelot 
CMIS @ Open Text 