Digital Asset Management Beyond CMIS
CMIS is an important component of DAM for many organizations, but
knowing how to use it to maximize its effectiveness is the key.
In this paper:
How organizations use CMIS for
effective collaboration
Common use cases for digital
asset management in today’s
organizations
More than ever, enterprises are embracing new
technologies with increased fervor, making cloud,
data analytics, mobile, embedded devices, and social
platforms core components of their strategies,
operations, and revenue streams. Such organizations
are referred to as “digital enterprises.”
Extending CMIS capabilities to
improve DAM
Why CMIS remains an important
component of DAM for many
enterprises
Executive Brief
EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Although there are nearly as many definitions of what a digital enterprise is as there are ways to
become one, digital enterprises have three common criteria:
• They view information as a strategic asset and data as currency
• Collaboration is a requirement for their success
• Chief data officers, or those acting in that role, play a vital role in breaking down silos
separating departments, particularly at companies struggling to enter the digital age
In addition, organizations that leverage digital
technology as a competitive advantage in internal
and external operations rely on finding new
business value in their content.
In more traditional enterprises, which are often
reliant on legacy systems, information is siloed or
trapped in a set of files, making it complicated to
integrate and leverage that content. To be a digital
enterprise requires removing these silos, regardless
of whether they are a result of legacy systems or
due to new technologies and concepts, such as big
data or cloud-based software. To have a leg up on the competition, organizations must create
efficiencies and effective collaboration, which is not possible if silos are present.
As a result, there has been an increase in demand for applications that enable organizations to
find greater value in their content and better manage digital assets, particularly those that can
integrate with content management systems (CMS).
The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard has greatly helped facilitate
much of today’s information sharing. CMIS is an OASIS specification for content management
interoperability. It enables clients and servers to communicate in HTTP (e.g., REST with JSON,
AtomPub or SOAP) using a unified domain model.
The CMIS standard is an OASIS
specification for content
management interoperability and
has helped facilitate much of
today’s information sharing.
© Nuxeo
This has resulted in many improvements in
managing digital assets, particularly for external
applications that need to perform simple Store and
Retrieve actions from the content repository. CMIS is
also a good fit for leveraging client libraries and in
situations where consumer applications must remain
independent from those of the repository vendor.
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EXECUTIVE BRIEF
There are a number of use cases where CMIS really shines. It can be used to:
•
•
•
•
•
Expose a digital asset management (DAM) repository
Help a CMS client (like Portal or WCM) fetch content
Push producer application content (e.g., saving pictures from Photoshop)
Integrate small business applications
Work with SAP to pull or push invoices from or to a central content repository
As powerful as CMIS is, however, it is not without
constraints. Many organizations stretch it beyond its
capabilities as an interoperability protocol and use it to
build APIs. Unfortunately, CMIS is a poor choice for
building a complete API; the advantages of the
interoperability protocol become flaws for an API. There
are many circumstances in which CMIS is commonly
found that are less than ideal fits.
Many organizations stretch
CMIS beyond its capabilities
as an interoperability protocol
and use it to build APIs.
When used to build applications, the disadvantages of CMIS are readily apparent. Particularly the
fact that it has:
• Low efficiency due to a great deal of back and forth communication
• Very limited control over marshaling e.g., users can choose what document attributes should be retrieved
• No granularity management e.g., changes are applied to a set of documents as an atomic action
These disadvantages have a direct impact on functionality. For example, as a result of limited
control over marshaling you cannot define what data must be sent to the client, and lack of
granularity makes it impossible to chain several operations inside a single transaction.
While all of these shortcomings may seem like technical details, they are not. They have a direct
impact on the application’s functionality. They are the primary differentiator between an
application that works on the developer’s laptop and one that works in a production environment
on a server with real users. Ultimately, they determine how well your digital assets will integrate
and how effective collaboration will be, resulting in a direct impact on the business.
CMIS has much to offer many organizations; knowing how to use it to maximize its effectiveness is
the key.
© Nuxeo
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EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Extending CMIS Capabilities to Improve DAM
The CMIS protocol has room for extensibility, however, interoperability is oftentimes lost when
using extensions, defeating the purpose of the extensibility. Fortunately, there is a solution that can
extend CMIS capabilities without breaking interoperability.
The Nuxeo Platform takes an innovative approach to CMS development, offering a flexible end-toend content management platform and a set of tools built on open source technologies and
standards.
Nuxeo offers a number of benefits that are accessible to users via CMIS capabilities:
✓ Making CMISQL queries scalable
• Leveraging Elasticsearch integration
✓ Exposing custom renditions via CMIS
• Multi-Blob documents that are supported in Nuxeo but not in CMIS
• Custom processing and transformations
This extensibility goes a long way toward improving DAM.
The Nuxeo Platform CMIS connector, a built-in CMIS-compliant interface of the Nuxeo Platform
repository, lets your content-based applications create and access content in a standard, vendorindependent manner.
© Nuxeo
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EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Nuxeo’s innovation does not end here; additional enhancements to the Nuxeo Platform further
refine DAM. Currently by default CMIS supports only scalar properties whereas Nuxeo supports
complex properties (e.g., a list of addresses). To bridge this gap, Nuxeo linearizes Nuxeo Complex
properties to make them available to CMIS clients. Nuxeo plans to make these properties
accessible using a projection system and CMISItem (from CMIS 1.1) to expose the Nuxeo
Directory Model.
CMIS as First Class Citizen
Despite its limitations, CMIS remains an important component of DAM for many enterprises. While
it is not the main API for the Nuxeo Platform because it does not satisfy all of the requirements
needed for building good applications, Nuxeo comes with built-in support for CMIS.
Organizations seeking to extend the platform server side and use CMIS to access it can do so
using the Native Extension API. So long as the extensions are mainly processing, CMIS can be
used to trigger the processing or get the results. With this extension, the native API can be used
for development while content is made available to the “outside world” via CMIS.
This is possible because everything in the Nuxeo Platform is a plug-in, and Nuxeo is designed for
custom plug-ins and native plug-ins to have equal footing.
The company also helps maintain the Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS library, a general-purpose
Java library that allows developers to easily write CMIS clients and servers.
USE CASE: CONTENT MIGRATION USING CMIS
Repositories are typically backed by a database of some sort,
so a database-to-database content migration is possible, but
it's a pain. The CMIS standard understands content, therefore
it’s able to migrate documents, not rows sitting in tables. This is
one of the many great benefits of using the CMIS standard. has been committed to CMIS since the very beginning. They joined OASIS in 2008 to
“ Nuxeo
work on the specification, and in 2009 when Nuxeo proposed the creation of the Apache
Chemistry project at Apache, over half of the original committers were from Nuxeo. Since then
they've continued to work collaboratively with others to push both the spec and the de facto
reference implementation forward. “
- Jeff Potts, Co-Author of “CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action” and Founder of Metaversant
© Nuxeo
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EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Why Nuxeo?
All of this functionality is designed with the end goal of effective DAM to deliver greater business
value. The Nuxeo Platform ensures this is the case. Designed by developers for developers, the
Nuxeo Platform offers a highly customizable and extensible content management platform for
building business applications.
The Nuxeo Platform repository extends this customizability and extensibility even further. The
repository was designed to handle structured content, not just files and metadata. Documents in
the Nuxeo Platform are actually content objects, defined by properties. Very complex data
structures can be associated to a content object, along with any number of files. These objects are
the unit of content to be manipulated in an application. Content automation using business logic
streamlines the manageability further, as does an embedded and powerful workflow engine that
leverages the main modules of the platform.
Perhaps nowhere are the choices around Nuxeo clearer than when it comes to deployment
options. Nuxeo Runtime and the OSGi bundle model allow Nuxeo Platform deployments to be
adapted to organizational needs: Deploy only the bundles you really need on as many servers and
infrastructures (e.g., Tomcat, Pojo or unit tests) as necessary. Nuxeo Platform also comes in several
deployment models, including Simple Deployment, Cluster HA, Cloud, and Hot Standby. In
addition, Nuxeo Platform can be deployed with dedicated processing nodes, read-only
synchronization and multiple repositories.
ABOUT NUXEO
Nuxeo provides an extensible and modular Open Source Content Management Platform enabling
architects and developers to easily build and run business applications. Designed by developers
for developers, the Nuxeo Platform offers modern technologies, a powerful plug-in model and
extensive packaging capabilities. It comes with ready-to-use Document Management, Digital
Asset Management and Case Management packages. 1000+ organizations rely on Nuxeo to run
business-critical applications, including Verizon, Electronic Arts, Sharp, FICO, the U.S. Navy, and
Jeppesen, a Boeing Company. Nuxeo is dual-headquartered in New York and Paris.
For more information about Nuxeo, please visit www.nuxeo.com.
© Nuxeo
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