ECM and standards
There’s been a discussion on the blogosphere at the beginning of July about standards, but I didn’t have time to comment it.
I think standards in ECM can only be a benefit. A reproach made to them is to lose functionalities by wanting to define a common interface. Right, but if you have more functionalities, you can extend the protocol to handle them. The importance of standard is to give software a commons interfaces to be able to exchange data or information. It should not be because your software do more than the protocol expose that you should not implement it.
From my point of view, we should use standards to expose the data inside of your system to the outside. For example if I expose data in an RDF format, I don’t have to store my data in RDF. Standards interfaces should only be here to expose the data and to enable other software to interact with yours. It’s a view of your system.
But I definitely agree that we need to work on new standards for ECM, everything is not covered yet by standards.
At eXo, like you’ve seen, we like standards and rely on them for a lot of functionalities.
- Delta-V
- WebDAV ordering
- WebDAV Search (Xpath, JCR-SQL, DASL)
I like webdav, because all the major OS (Mac OS, Linux/unix and Windows) are able to mount it. Also a bunch of software can interact with it.
For example we use this in our Ms Office and Open Office plugin to browse the repository, display comments and information about documents.
It allows us to expose our ECM using the sharing of folder on windows.
Everyone knows it. We also expose our data by this protocol.
RSS is a simple format, that’s why it’s so popular. It’s nice for feeding the user with notifications. A lot of users are using it, so why not implementing it for sending notifications about changes, new documents…
As Bex said, RSS is limited, but we can already do a lot with it.
We are working on this, especially for the Collaboration Suite. It’s a light way to structure data in XHTML.
We are part of the expert group of the JSR 283.
Everything now is based on the JCR.
We were the first certified implementations of the JSR168, and we are now part of the expert group of the JSR286.
All the applications running on the eXo Platform are based on it. A portlet can even be used in the webOS.
We use it to integrate remote Portlets.
- iCal / CalDAV (soon available)
Used for sharing calendars in the Collaboration Suite.
Participants of the discussion :
- Technology Standards and the Enterprise, Getting Too Much Attention?
- Lack of ECM Standards
- More Thoughts on ECM Standards
- WebDAV and RSS for ECM Standards?!? Holy Crap, NO!
- WebDAV and RSS for ECM Standards?!? Holy Crap, NO! Agreed. ATOM… Why the heck not?
- Round Two on ECM and Industry Standards
- This conversation…enabled via standards
