Chapter 1. Introduction

About CMIS
About xCMIS
About eXo CMIS

The eXo Platform provides CMIS support using the xCMIS project and the WCM Storage provider.

The CMIS standard aims at defining a common content management web services interface that can be applied in content repositories and bring about the interoperability across repositories. The formal specification of CMIS standard is approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee who drives the development, convergence and adoption of global information society. With CMIS, enterprises now can deploy systems independently, and create specialized applications running over a variety of content management systems.

To see the advantages of content interoperability and the significance of CMIS as a whole, it is necessary to learn about mutual targets which caused the appearance of specification first.

xCMIS project, which is initially contributed to the Open Source community by eXo Platform, is an Open Source implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. xCMIS supports all the features stated in the CMIS core definition and both REST AtomPub and Web Services (SOAP/WSDL) protocol bindings.

eXo CMIS is built on the top of xCMIS embedded in Platform to expose the WCM drives as the CMIS repositories. The CMIS features are implemented as a set of components deployed on the eXo Container using XML files to describe the service configuration.

Figure: how eXo CMIS works

WCM drives exposure is implemented as WCM storage provider to xCMIS SPI. Storage provider uses mappings from WCM's ManageDriveService to actual JCR nodes. And AtomPub bindings makes WCM structure available via CMIS standart API.