Preface

It was early 2012 (Q1), long past the OASIS approval of CMIS 1.0 as a standard. Due to my work on the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) since 2008, I had become a sort of hub for CMIS support within IBM, but over the last year this role had begun to snowball. By looking at my inbox each morning, it was quickly becoming clear to me that answering internal and customer CMIS questions could end up being a full-time job if the volume increase continued. I figured this must also be the case for many of my TC colleagues.

It should have been obvious to me before then, but it wasn’t. Not until a few customers and other IBMers had asked, “When will there be a book about CMIS?” did I realize the time had come. I needed to talk to Florian about getting a lineup of authors together to approach this subject. One thing I knew for sure is that his participation would be critical. Probably a third of the internal support questions I received about Apache Chemistry had to be deferred to him already. Hands down, nobody knew as much about OpenCMIS as he did, and he was turning out to be a very important library to IBM and our customers.

Florian and I had a few meetings about this, and we decided that it would be nice to have two more authors to help shoulder the load, because this book would have to cover a lot of ground (we were guessing more than 500 pages), and we both had day jobs.

First on our wish list was Jeff Potts. Not only was Jeff the author of cmislib, which eventually became the Python library part of Apache Chemistry, but he was already an experienced technical author. (He had single-handedly written the very successful Alfresco Developer Guide in 2008.) The combination of CMIS expertise with that level of technical writing prowess meant he was a must for this writing team.

Luckily for us, both Florian and I had worked with Jeff in the past—Florian in his former role at Alfresco, and myself when Jeff and I coauthored a developerWorks article about cmislib in March 2010. Even more fortunate, Jeff agreed to join us. But there were still some gaps to be filled. So far we had IBM, Alfresco, Apache Chemistry, and SAP on board, but that still left us with a conspicuous gap in our lineup: Microsoft...

A month later, we had begun courting publishers and had something tentative going with Manning, but our roster was still not complete. SharePoint is a subject that we didn’t want to gloss over, and we still didn’t have anyone on board with a SharePoint CMIS background. To make a long story short, through a contact at the TC (Adam Harmetz), we ended up getting one of the engineers who was working on the CMIS implementation for SharePoint 13 (Matt Mooty) to commit to writing the chapter that would eventually cover not only SharePoint but .NET as well.

Of course, we still had a long list of areas we wanted to cover where we were going to need some more outside help. That’s where Jens, Jean-Marie, Richard, Gi, Jane, and Dave came in to save us (see the acknowledgments for details and special thanks to these very important contributors).

And now here we are, over a year later. We hope that this book will stand as the authoritative CMIS reference for years to come. This was a primary goal early on, and the reason we’ve taken on a lot of extra work to cover the new 1.1 spec, even though the ink has barely dried. In fact, as I type this, the public review has just completed and Oasis has made version 1.1 official.

I know its cliché, but I’ll say it anyway. This has been more work than we ever thought, going into the project, but now that it’s almost done I know we’re all glad we did it and we’re extremely proud of the end result. We hope that you enjoy it and, more importantly, that it helps you succeed in whatever project you’re undertaking with CMIS.

JAY BROWN