Time to celebrate

Dear fellow members of the CMIS TC:

It has been more than a month since I asked for your input on possible next step for the TC. So far, no one has come forward proposing new work, new focus, or new direction for the TC. There seems to be a general agreement that the TC has indeed accomplished what it set out to do. Therefore, as your TC Chair, I am hereby proud to congratulate you for a job well done, and to announce that it is time for us to formally conclude our work and bring this TC to a close. I do not know whether we still need to conduct a Full Majority Vote. I shall let Chet to help us proceed properly from here.

To all the TC members, past and present, I would like to express once again my deep and sincere appreciation of all your participation, cooperation, hard work, contribution, and patience. It has been truly a pleasure and a great honor to work with you all! Special thanks are due to our Editors: Al Brown, Ethan Gur-Esh, Ryan McVeigh, Florian Müller, Jens Hübel, and Ken Baclawski. They did the hard work to produce our end products - a tremendous and painstaking job that is not always thoroughly appreciated. We thank Gregory Melahn for leading the Browser Binding Subcommittee, which drafted the "lighter" yet highly popular Browser Binding for v1.1. We thank Gershon Janssen for his contribution which resulted in CMIS becoming a required ICT compliance for EU government procurement. And, of course, over the years we have numerous champions who articulated requirements, developed solutions, and/or authored proposals. It would be difficult to list them all. But, their work will be permanently kept in publicly accessible OASIS archive. Then, there are numerous unsung heroes, including our TC Members' colleagues and the public, who contributed directly or indirectly to our success by evaluating, implementing, and/or promoting CMIS. I would also like to recognize the impact of the Apache Chemistry project and the OpenCMIS implementation. While CMIS does not have an official reference implementation, Chemistry's contribution to the success of CMIS is undeniable, not the least helped by Florian's dual roles.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the OASIS staff, in particular Chet Ensign and his predecessor Mary McRae, who coached and assisted us, making our life easier.

Before we turn off the light, I would like to include a brief history of CMIS which most people do not know.
The idea of having a platform-independent standard interface for content management had been tossed around in iECM discussions within AIIM in 2005-2006. Unfortunately, these remained concept-level discussions and no technical work was initiated to develop such an interface.
In the Fall of 2006, recognizing the need for standardization in order to exploit vast amount of captured content in a landscape of proprietary ECM systems with closed content "silos" deployed everywhere, and also recognizing that such a standardization effort could succeed only if the major ECM vendors promoted it, EMC approached IBM and Microsoft and formed a joint project in October 2006 to develop an initial draft of CMIS for possible standardization. In August 2007, Alfresco, Open Text, BEA, and SAP were invited to review the draft. (Florian was one of the participants. Thank you, Florian, for hanging in there all these years!) A year later, in August 2008, the seven companies got together and successfully tested interoperability of their separate implementations of the draft spec. In September 2008, EMC, IBM and Microsoft jointly unveiled the draft spec and donated it to OASIS. The CMIS TC was formed in November 2008, and the rest was history. Altogether, the TC held 155 meetings, include 3 face-to-face ones. Below are a few major milestones for the TC:
•    Nov 2008    CMIS TC formed
•    Mar 2009    Multi-vendor demo of CMIS at AIIM Expo by iECM
•    Aug 2009    Interoperability testing among CMIS TC members
•    Apr 2010    Second multi-vendor demo of CMIS at AIIM Expo by iECM
•    May 2010    CMIS v1.0 approved as an OASIS Standard
•    May 2011    Interoperability testing of CMIS v1.0 among TC members
•    Nov 2011    CMIS v1.0 Errata 01 released
•    May 2013    CMIS v1.1 approved as an OASIS Standard
•    Sep 2015    CMIS v1.1 Errata 01 released
•    Oct 2016    CMIS v1.0 and v1.1 approved as required ICT compliance for EU government procurement

It has been a great honor and a privilege for me to serve as your TC Chair. Many thanks to all the participants, we managed to maintain a friendly, open, and cooperative working environment within the TC throughout. For me personally, this has been a 10-year journey. I enjoyed working with all of you, and learned a great deal from you along the way. It is now time for us to close out and celebrate. Because of our collective work, the content management industry is no longer the same today.

We did it!

My very best regards to all, and best wishes to your other endeavors.

David

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