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. 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. Nuxeo 2
There are a number of use cases where CMIS really shines. It can be used to: EXECUTIVE BRIEF 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 3
Extending CMIS Capabilities to Improve DAM EXECUTIVE BRIEF 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 4
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. Nuxeo has been committed to CMIS since the very beginning. They joined OASIS in 2008 to 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 5
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 6