CMIS

MirrorNG Integration

The CMIS side of MirrorNG is powered by ActiveCMIS; more information on ActiveCMIS is available here.

The list of supported CMIS features is located here.

ActiveCMIS is integrated with MirrorNG for read access. This means that a CMIS repository can be used as a source for a migration. ActiveCMIS already has write support, so with only a few changes to MirrorNG we will be able to also use a CMIS system as the target of a migration.

Scenarios

Migrating between Documentum and a CMIS system

Older versions of Documentum can not act as a CMIS provider, this is a non-issue as MirrorNG already supports documentum systems natively through the ActiveDCTM library.

Alfresco fully supports CMIS 1.0 from version 3.3 on. So we can use MirrorNG to migrate from an Alfresco system to a Documentum system, or we could migrate in the other direction by implementing the necessary features to enable update functionality for CMIS systems in MirrorNG.

Using MirrorNG as a universal user interface to several EMC systems

While MirrorNG is not meant as a user interface for normal users, and does currently not allow creating or updating documents through the interface it should be possible to use it as a universal user interface. Note that we need to have a way to have different MirrorNG repositories served to different people, meaning we need to add more flexibility to the authentication system.

MirrorNG as a CMIS Provider

Using MirrorNG as a CMIS provider is not currently implemented.

Because of the different capabilities of different CMIS implementations it would not be inherently possible to provide every feature that CMIS specifies for each served repository. Instead it would be necessary to base the broadcasted capabilities on the combination of the source repository and the MirrorNG transformation layer. For example if a transformation takes place to rename certain folders it would be necessary to parse queries and to rename the folders in the query before sending them to the originating server. Alternatively queries could be disabled for that given repository (note that MirrorNG currently does not provide a uniform mechanism for querying the different repositories it knows about).

CMIS Limitations

The scope of the CMIS standard does not include every conceivable feature that you might need and would generally expect from a Enterprise Content Management system. This means that if you need these features you will need to bypass ActiveCMIS and work directly with the repository in a more native format.

There is no support for user or group management in CMIS. This means that creating new users or groups in a new system can't be done by MirrorNG, but must be done manually.

Another missing feature is support for creating or modifying types. This means thaf it's necessary for a migration to create new types of documents on the target system, then this has to be done without the help of MirrorNG.