Content Log

CMIS Face to Face at Microsoft in Redmond

Dave Caruana and I just finished participating the in the first Face to Face of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee here in Redmond, WA. Companies participating in person were IBM, Oracle, EMC, Alfresco, Exalead, OpenText, SAP, Day, Nuxeo, Dennis Hamilton (representing himself), and of course, Microsoft. Gary Gershon, Julian Reshke from Greenbytes and Betsy Fanning from AIIM participated by phone. (Sorry if I missed anyone.) Virtually everyone in the Enterprise Content Management market. The tone of the meeting was very cooperative and collaborative. David Choy from EMC is the chair of the committee and did a good job of staying neutral on the issues. Al Brown from IBM/FileNet is the secretary for the bindings and Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft is the secretary for the data model. All three did an excellent job keeping things on track and discussing all the open issues. Most of us have all worked together before in both the JCR meetings and iECM meetings and that made collaboration a lot easier. Dennis and I even go back to ODMA and DMA - over 15 years ago.

(BTW, I micro-blogged what was going on Twitter. CMIS Tweets are below. You can follow me on http://twitter.com/johnnewton)

The CMIS effort so far has been use case driven with the main use cases being collaborative content management, integration into portals, mashups and search. There are a number of use cases that explicitly out of scope, such as records management and web content management. Some use cases lie in between where the main application may not be addressed, but we want to allow developers to create applications that may access the information that may be created by other out-of-scope applications. An example that we discussed a lot was records management. We don't want CMIS to be so complex that you can build a records management system, but you may want to access records information for the purposes of eDiscovery.

These use cases that are in-scope seem to be clear and compelling enough that we all agreed that we urgently want to get CMIS to market to get people building these applications. Although this was one of the last thing that we discussed, it is the most impressive outcome of the meeting. There was so much agreement and consensus in the meeting that we all felt it is important to meet the deadline of having CMIS complete before the end of the year. David Choy did a great job outlining the OASIS process and what must be done. The bureaucracy (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) of the OASIS process is such that the minimum time that it takes to get from public review to standard is 6 months. So we all agreed a timeline that would get this done. This means that the spec will be ready for public review by the end of Spring. That's a mean feat, but all agreed doable with few obstacles in the way. It also means that the 0.5 spec going into the OASIS process was pretty solid.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty to discuss. It was a three day event after all and we used it all up. The most controversial issues were around security and what is truly RESTful. The Security proposal was presented by SAP who have a real need to secure documents consistently with the SAP system. This was an excellent use case and provided a real-world example from which to work and focused on Access Control Lists. Most of us have been involved in round and round discussions on security and I'm not quite sure how we got to a general consensus. We are not quite done, but we all seem to have a great deal of agreement. A subcommittee will work on this some more. I had proposed a more abstract Policy interface prior to OASIS submission based upon work that we have done in iECM and JSR-283. After discussing this with David Pitfield of Oracle, I think we need to think about that one some more. (Sorry James McGovern, but XACML was shot down in flames. For the reasons why, please see this IBM article on implementing ACLs with XACML and look how horrible ACLs look. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xacml/)

David Nuescheler, who is the chair of the JSR-283 committee and CTO of Day Software, presented a couple of discussions in collaboration with Julian Reschke. Julian is also on the WebDAV committee and brings a unique perspective. David presented some of the thoughts that originated with Roy Fielding, also from Day, on whether the REST binding is really RESTful. Although there are arguments to not call the Atom Pub protocol REST bindings, we all felt it was important to communicate our intentions toward REST. In the end, we will call the protocol support RESTful Atom Pub bindings or something like that. David suggested perhaps exploring protocols other than Atom Pub, such as WebDAV. Apparently, these were ruled out quite a while ago and there are already WebDAV standards bodies. Decision is to continue with Atom Pub. Julian, who also seems to know HTTP extremely well, logged many issues around how CMIS uses / abuses HTTP and most of his recommendations are being incorporated into the spec.

David also raised the issue of reference implementations. In the end, we all agreed that we are all making progress on our own implementations and that a reference implementation wasn't necessary. There was interest and probably continues to be interest in an open Test Compliance Kit (TCK), but we all agreed that a clearer spec should be the primary point of reference rather than a TCK. It may be up to us, the open source vendors, to come up with a TCK. We have already created both a Java and .NET test harness to test CMIS access. Even Microsoft said that if you need a free CMIS test platform, you can get Alfresco. :-)

As the spec has developed, we have all been prototyping our implementations. The early implementors (Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP - in alphabetical order :-)) participated in an interoperability session or "plug-fest" at a Redmond interop lab in August prior to making the spec public. And it worked! It is a real testament to the fact that this is becoming a real standard. In other words, it works. This is part of the reason that there is not as much demand for a reference implementation. It is also part of the reason that it continues to develop and have such momentum. By working with each other to test each others implementations, we are discovering what needs to be tweaked in our software and what needs to be fixed in the spec. Another interop session is planned sometime around AIIM as well as a demo that the AIIM conference is organizing and sponsoring.

In addition, we were able to demonstrate our integrations with CMIS. IBM showed Quickr accessing CMIS. Day showed a prototype that they are working on that sits on Jackrabbit. Dave showed some new components that we are working on with Share and the Joomla and Drupal integrations with Alfresco using CMIS. Microsoft and EMC had shown their integrations in previous interop sessions.

There were a few other issues that we discussed. OpenText presented hierarchical properties. I presented a proposal on how to deal with Aspects or Mixins. A little more than half the systems represented, some like Oracle and IBM had more than one, support some notion similar to Aspects - think of them as data type plug-ins. The vendors that have broad search requirements had a great deal of interest in Universal Search (really a new use case) and want to see access to change logs to simplify indexing new or changed documents in ECM systems. However, I think we all agree that we don't want any of these to hold up a 1.0 of the specification and getting CMIS out to market.

CMIS has momentum. It will be a real specification. We all seem to agree on what we want and what our customers need. Companies are implementing it. IBM, EMC and Alfresco have released 0.5 implementations. Microsoft can't talk about what they are doing, but they will. (They would probably have to kill me if I knew exactly what they are doing. ;-)) It could be more and it can probably be better, but CMIS that is out there and implemented will be better than the perfect spec coming out much later.

Microsoft were gracious hosts and provided with good facilities and food. (Just replace the projector bulb. :-)) Thanks very much Ethan!

If you are interested, CMIS Tweets follow:

• Discussing CMIS use cases: Collab Content Mgmt, Portals, Mashups, Search
• Open use case issues: Observation, tagging, data dict., better REST bindings - less verbose
• Can't use MSN Messenger inside of Microsoft on their guest network. Bizarre.
• Going thru introductions, including favorite color. (Hmm.) Should note that SAP and OpenText are also here.
• Interesting discussion on reference implementation. Decision that Tech Committee will not implement ref impl.
• TC agrees that we need well documented test cases. Lots of interest in a Test Compat Kit.
• Show and tell coming up. Day and Lotus.
• Tomorrow will be REST design (with input from Roy Fielding via David Nuescheler), schema design and various issues.
• Now discussing REST issues. David Nuescheler is bringing up the issues first raised by Roy Fielding who first described REST.
• Discussed REST at length. Staying with Atom Pub, but will look at browser-based Javascript libraries.
• Gary Gershon is reviewing the SOAP bindings for CMIS.
• David Nuescheler: "There is no such thing as a REST binding. REST is an architecture."
• It is very difficult to concentrate on the minutiae of SOAP web services. (zzzzzz)
• Ethan (MSFT) now discussing unified search.
• Long discussion on universal search and relationship to observation. Universal search indexing looks like a MUST. Obs is SHOULD.
• Dave Caruana is demonstrating Alfresco SURF and CMIS.
• Dave Caruana just demonstrated Joomla and Drupal integrated with Alfresco thru CMIS.
• Just got caught out. I'm supposed to talk about data dictionaries and I don't remember what the issue was. :( Jet Lag!
• Long discussion on ACLs proposed by SAP. No appetite for XACML. Sorry James McGovern. Keeping it very simple.
• I was very surprised at Microsoft's interest in content crawling and Universal Search. Lumped into Observation discussion y'day.
• Just finished presenting how to do Mixins / Aspects in CMIS. Some want to model as related objects. How would you do it?
• Just finished OpenText proposal on "Hierarchical Properties"
• Question on the table - What do we need to do to finish the proposal?
• After lunch, group photo! Courtesy of Dennis Hamilton.
• Now batching.
• Discussing timeline for CMIS and flowcharted process. We are remarkably close! But min 6 months.
• Let me clarify. Get to public review in under 6 months.
• Closing out most open issues on spec from the Technical Committee.
• Would love to see Adobe here.
• Successful CMIS face to face complete! :-)

Brainstorming at Fortune Brainstorm in Half Moon Bay, CA

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Cloud Computing: Michael Copeland (Fortune), Charles Fitzgerald (Pi/EMC), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Adam Selipski (Amazon Web Services), Marissa Mayer (Google)

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

CTO Forum: Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Sophie Vanderbroeken (Xerox), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Bob Iannucci (Nokia)

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco,  Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

Greening the Valley: James Manyika (Fortune and hidden by the Fortune sign), VJ Joshi (HP), Rob Lloyd (Cisco), Michael Spliter (Applied Materials), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

   

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks and moderator), David Hansson (37signals), Roger Simonyi (Intentional), Grady Booch (IBM)

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.


Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life.  Is He In Denial? - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

A glimpse into the future of the Internet - Tom Forenski, ZDNet Blogs

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: Making money isn't a priority (except for her) - Nicholas Carlson, Valleywag

Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

The best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk: Neil Young challenges tech industry - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

The blog editing system in action - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

Twitter on CNN Democratic Debates in New Hampshire

I signed up for Twitter a while ago and I couldn't really see the point. Tonight though I thought it would be worth blogging on twitter on the Democratic debates using twitter, especially since I am in Washington DC right now. Twitter is a super short blog with 140 characters.

It's sort of fun to type out what I am thinking at the moment while I am watching it. I looked at the public time line on twitter while the debates were going on, I didn't see anyone else use twitter to comment.

You can see my twitter blog here.

Unfortunately, I am out tomorrow night and I'll miss the Republican debates.