New ECM Interoperability Standard Proposal on AIIM

There is a new proposal for a standards based Services Oriented Architecture Framework for Interoperable Enterprise Content Management on the AIIM web site. AIIM is the "international authority on Enterprise Content Management." The initiative is being lead by Paul Fontaine of the US Department of Transportation and Mike Connor of Adobe. If successful, this standard will enable companies to share content across different content management systems.

Back in 2000, the ECM industry's position was that effective content management could only be provided by large centralized monolithic applications. This development is interesting because it is another sign that ECM vendors are turning away from the business of providing a single unified (one size fits none) solution for all of an organization's diverse content management needs. If successful, these standards will allow organizations to select best of breed technologies that meet the specific needs of business processes without sacrificing content reuse and cross departmental information sharing.

There are a number of other standards that will also be effective in implementing interoperable content architectures. The Java Content Repository (JSR 170) provides a standard interface for a content repository to facilitate the integration and substitution of content management systems. The Semantic Web enabled by RDF is enabling content applications to interact and share information with one another. Content syndication standards like RSS and Atom open new possibilities for content aggregation and reuse. Metadata standards like the Dublin Core help make content easier to find.

It is going to be very interesting to see how these standards evolve and realize their potential to create effective content management solutions. I would expect rapid evolution of new content applications that streamline communication and discover new value for existing content.

Bricolage Launches Bricolage Wiki

The Bricolage project recently announced the launch of their community Wiki. The presence of the Wiki will help spread the load of managing user and technical documentation for Bricolage. Currently, documentation is pretty thin and difficult to navigate so the mail list is the primary source of information on using and developing in Bricolage. If the community embraces the Wiki, it could be a very valuable resource.

Right now, there is no content on the Wiki so the best bets for Bricolage documentation are the How To Guides, the API Docs (which also have some user docs sprinkled in), this overview article on Perl.org, and, of course, the mail archives.

If you use Bricolage and are looking for a way to contribute, helping populate the Wiki would be a great way to get started.

Open Source CMS Migration Tool

There is talk of new Open Source project to develop an application to migrate content from one CMS to another. The Exorcist is for content what ETL (Extract, Translate, Load) tools are for data. The design of the application uses custom import/export plugins that that are installed on the source and target repositories and translate content into an XML format that can be read, translated, and written by The Exorcist. The application then does XML transformations from what the source plugin can write to what the target plugin can read.

At present, The Exorcist is still a concept which has been presented in blogs and at various conferences. Initial development will be for the Midgard Framework. As of this date, there is no project site for the project.