topic Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011 in Alfresco Archive

CMIS Plugfest 2011

rapa — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:06:37 GMT

About 20 members of the OASIS CMIS TC will meet in Redmond in order to test the interoperability of their products and solutions.From WeWebU Alexander Haag and James Michel will participate and test both OpenWorkdesk and Zero-Install Desktop Integration (http://www.wewebu.de/en/products/zero-install

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Wed, 25 May 2011 06:45:31 GMT

After a few minor snags on Monday, namely a missing (stolen) hire car, we got to Redmond defying Icelandic volcanos and dodging US tornados. Monday afternoon involved mainly trying to cope with jetlag and familarizing ourselves with restaurants and local shops. In the evening, we had to resolve a problem with some faulty U.S. electrical adapters for our laptops, which Alex was eventually able to fix with the aid of a pair of nail clippers.

On Tuesday morning, after a tasty breakfast with pancakes and maple syrup at our hotel, we drove to Microsoft where we were well received by the TC members. It appears that WeWebU is a company that seems to intrigue quite a few people. I wonder why? I hope to find out over the next few days.

The 2011 Plugfest (formerly known as the Face2Face meeting) started at 8:30 with an introduction from the chairman David Choy (EMC) and then a brief round-the-room introduction from everybody. This year we have a very good turn-out with IBM, Alfresco, Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, SAP, Open Text, Nuxeo, HP, Zia Consulting, Genus Technologies, GX Software and of course not forgetting WeWebU.

This was followed with an interesting discussion where everyone presented CMIS 1.0 use case scenarios that their companies had encountered with various customers. For example, Adam Harmetz (Microsoft) talked about an interesting and unusual requirement for CMIS inside a prison administration system. Jay Brown (IBM) talked about a scenario where a customer was required to support several repositories belonging to several different companies, all of which were now extinct, consisting of several terabytes of data. Alfresco addressed secondary object types (as did SAP) and also mentioned the need to explore authentication, which is also a concern for WeWebU currently.

Then there was a coffee break, when I had a nice chat with Jens Hübel and David Caruana.

Following this was a presentation on Retention Type policies by Martin Hermes (SAP). This proposal relies strongly on secondary object types, which is needed by several of us (incl. WeWebU). There was particular discussion about the use of a proposed identifier named cmis:rm:hold, an identifier used to prevent other applications from modifiying its asociated document. The purpose of this request is mainly to do with auditory and legal use cases.

Then came lunch. Round the lunch table, we had a nice chat with Derek Chow (Genus), Gi Lee (Zia Consulting) and Adam Harmetz (Microsoft) over a delicious meal courtesy of Microsoft Marketing.

The plugfest begins:

Oh! Ain't I the popular one 🙂 as I hand out a free WeWebU USB sticks to everyone containing a free copy of our OpenWorkdesk Community Edition (a.k.a. "OpenWorkdesk on a Stick").

Had a nice chat with Adam Harmetz (MS), Norrie Quinn (EMC) and David Choy (EMC) regarding Annotations. It seems as if our proposal has come at the right time. There is certainly a lot of positive remarks, even right from the start from Derek Chow (Genus). Can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Norrie Quinn (EMC) and David Choy (EMC) also expressed interest in seeing our Advanced Document Viewer, which we hope that we will get working on their EMC Documentum Cloud in the next day… admittedly we are having a few minor authentication problems with the SOAP service, but I'm sure that our wizard Alex will figure a way to connect.

Also mentioned to David Choy that we would perhaps like to host the Plugfest. He seems very much up for that 🙂

Looking forward to hooking up with Ryan McVeigh (Zia Consulting) tomorrow 🙂

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:14:33 GMT

Had a nice meal last night at the Din Tai Fung chinese restaurant in Belleview all expenses paid by Microsoft (well at least I hope so…). The food was excellent and I really must recommend them. The company was also excellent: we sat next to Seoras Ashby (Adobe), Jens Hübel (Open Text) and Martin Hermes (SAP) - a very entertaining evening.

Off to have an early breakfast at Microsoft this morning and then we start promptly at 8:30.

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:12:11 GMT

We arrived a little too early at the Microsoft reception and so had to wait for a while before someone could let us in, but we had a nice chat with Jay Brown (IBM) about cloud hosting.

The doors open and we went to get our breakfast. A nice spread laid on by Microsoft catering once again.

The meeting kicked off at 8:30 with a discussion about the Secondary Types proposal with Florian Müller (Alfresco). Currently this is a feature greatly needed by WeWebU, SAP and several other client-side vendors. The idea behind Secondary Types would enable additional metadata to be attached to documents in a repository with minimal impact. Adam Harmetz (Microsoft) was curious how this would affect the current Sharepoint implementation if such a feature happened to be added. He implied that this was not a feature that Microsoft needed. Should it be optional? The consensus was "yes", but it seemed as if most repositories could (or should be able to) support secondary types.

The Browser Binding proposal discussion was headed by Gregory Melahn (IBM), who sadly wasn't able to join us in person, but was able to conduct the meeting over the phone. Browser binding is about using existing standardized browser technologies to bind to CMIS, such as HTML and Javascript. Norrie Quinn (EMC) questioned the feasibility of Browser Binding, since the current proposal wasn't adopting popular patterns used by many of the industry leaders. The question was whether there would need to be a further specification for bindings within the next 2 years. What would be the longeavity of this current browser binding specification?

Adam Harmetz (Microsoft) stated that the browser binding would likely cause considerable delays to being able to support this feature, because the expanse of code that would need to be tested.

Olivier Grisel (Nuxeo) admitted that Nuxeo had already implemented it with Apache Chemistry.

Ryan McVeigh (Zia Consulting) stated that browser binding would greatly reduce the information to the client by filtering everything that the user needs to know, but AtomPub would give the user all the information, which could be large and would not be necessary. For mobile applications and light weight clients, browser binding could be a good way forward.

Seoras Ashby (Adobe) questioned whether it was feasible at all to continue with AtomPub, because it appeared that AtomPub was compromising the needs for the CMIS browser binding. Florian Müller (Alfresco) said that Alfresco were able to circumvent most of their AtomPub difficulties. Adam Harmetz (Microsoft) implied that Microsoft were concerned about the ongoing work into AtomPub implementations, when it was thought that there could be better solutions, but stated that web services were not the answer.

To summarize, is AtomPub the way forward for browser binding or should we look for a better long-term solution with lower payloads?

Not everyone is convinced…

An informal vote was made and a decision was made to introduce Browser Binding into the CMIS 1.1 specification but only as an optional feature.

All in all it was an very interesting and lively discussion for what appears to be quite a controversial subject.

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:16:39 GMT

After a coffee break and a quick chat with Norrie and David from EMC, the technical committee gathered together and posed for a team photo taken by none other than Jay Brown (IBM). Looking forward to seeing the result…

David Churchland (HP) reopened the late morning discussions on Secondary Types by asking for the reason why they should be needed if they are simply just properties.

There is a need to clarify "required" property to secondary types. This is currently ambiguous in the proposal. Our Alex (WeWebU) stressed that it wasn't clear how the system could communicate the default data value for the "required" secondary type, when needed at creation time. It was explained that this should be set automatically by the repository if a system value or by the application if a context-specific property. Nevertheless it was agreed that it should be defined more clearly, since there are differences in the semantics of the use of the "required" properties in the case of Secondary Types.

Olivier Grisel (Nuxeo) asked whether it would be a consideration to be able to filter secondary type property lists or would this be delivered in one large bundle. Would this be handled by the application or filtered by the server?

Break for lunch: another wonderful gourmet meal from Microsoft catering courtesy of the Microsoft Marketing team. I know that our host is one of the richest companies in the world, but it is still extremely generous of them to provide all with free food and drinks. With all the spare dollars in my pocket, I'll try to buy something nice at the Microsoft shop later I need to buy the kids some souvenirs… Perhaps I'll buy them some MS Project licenses - I'm sure they'll love me for that

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Wed, 25 May 2011 22:39:17 GMT

Lunch over. Now down to business…

We're trying out OpenWorkdesk on Alfresco 4.0 today and it works, although we will need to rework the Alfresco CMIS extensions since we are having some problems with Aspects However this doesn't appear to be a big problem and this is the purpose of the Plugfest: to sniff out those goddam bugs!

We got OpenWorkdesk on a Stick working with the IBM P8 cloud and Jay Brown has just copied it into a virtual machine and is going to send it to his colleagues to start testing.

Just had a coffee with Norrie Quinn from EMC. I really like this guy. I wonder if we can get something going with Documentum. That would be cool!

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:23:28 GMT

Tools down at 16:30 and off to do some shopping with the team.

One of the perks this week, which almost everyone was looking forward to, was a shopping spree at the Microsoft Shop. The Microsoft Shop is renowned for selling the latest Microsoft software at a fraction of the price. For example, Windows 7 Ultimate edition retails at $50 and MS Office 2010 Professional for $60. If you own an XBox, there's a paradise of games for you here. Apart from the software and games, there are some really cool T-shirts for kids with slogans like "My daddy can program better than your daddy" and other souvenirs ranging from sports gear to cuddly toys. My kids won't be disappointed when I get home

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:35:53 GMT

Before i forget, here's Jay Brown's tweet with the CMIS Technical Committee photo: http://flic.kr/p/9LYj2u

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Thu, 26 May 2011 14:06:20 GMT

Another excellent evening, which was this time organized by Ryan McVeigh (Zia Consulting) at Earl's Steak House. As a European, we always hear these stories about the U.S where they serve up these massive steaks on a plate the size of small pacific island and then expect you to eat it all to prove that you're worthy to be a man. Very fortunately this wasn't the case. The steaks were large but moderately proportioned even for us Europeans.

I had a nice chat with Jay Brown (IBM), Bram de Kruijff (GX Software) and David Churchland (HP), who were all situated at my end of the table. It was a good evening.

Some of the team went off to shoot some pool afterwards, while the rest of us "losers" went on back to our hotels to hit the hay. Needless to say that I feel absolutely fine this morning with a clear head and ready for a good hearty Microsoft breakfast

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Thu, 26 May 2011 21:20:31 GMT

After a nice breakfast with Jay Brown (IBM) and Olivier Grisel (Nuxeo), we entered the conference room for a 3rd day of Face2Face discussions.

By the way, I was asked by a colleague before coming out here to count the number of Macbooks used by the CMIS Technical Committee. I can confirm that there are 7 Macbooks, 7 Dells, 3 IBM Thinkpads and 2 HP Notebooks. The Mac users are Alfresco, Adobe, Zia Consulting and SAP.

From the start, David Churchland (HP) started proceedings with a discussion on stored queries and the use of virtual folders. The question is whether this should be included in CMIS or not. There are some usecases that would benefit from stored queries in the repository. However should this be visible in CMIS? There were some interesting discussions here neither for nor against their inclusion from Adam Harmetz (Microsoft), David Choy (EMC), Jens Hübel (Open Text), Jay Brown (IBM) and Florian Müller (Alfresco). Jay reminded us that we couldn't just simply paste a file into a virtual folder and David Choy (EMC) also said that this would be a complex problem that we would need to solve, if we were to pursue this further.

At 9:00 we started the phone-in meeting with some general announcements from David Choy (chairman) regarding the upcoming schedule of CMIS TC meetings and other OASIS related business.

David gave us a stark reminder that all proposals are the team's responsibility. Once accepted, the team (TC) is ultimately responsible for this item. As a team, we should try to work out each proposal and reach resolution on its own merit. We should also try to visualize a roadmap for CMIS and define a goal for the next release and scope out its content.

There should be 2 proposal steps: an initiation/development phase to allow the ideas behind the proposal to grow and mature and the opportunity to say NO if it really is a bad idea; an acceptance phase to allow the proposal to be critically reviewed by the technical committee and the opportunity to say YES if a good idea. There should also be 2 decisions per each proposal: one for acceptance and the other for inclusion in a release.

Reviewing the current state of CMIS, David Choy remarked that we had had a great start with CMIS 1.0 and that CMIS had gained quite a bit of visibility and interest. So far there are a lot of implementations of CMIS and its success can be accredited to the TC. However, CMIS is still in its infancy and therefore is yet to truly establish itself. For CMIS to become a successful standard would depend on its adoption, since many standards in the past never got traction. The top priority would be to increase and promote its adoption. Adoption would be the key to the success of CMIS, since without it there would be no systems to test it against. Once a standard is widely accepted, it should be driven more by consumers and the demand should drive technology.

Norrie Quinn (EMC) appealed with the committee not to rush anything, but to deliver the same quality as v1.0 to satisfy the expectations of consumers. Ryan McVeigh (Zia Consulting) expressed concern that if CMIS did not deliver what it promised, it would be deemed to death similar to JCR. So therefore CMIS is being viewed by customers with high expectations and great anticipation.

VOTING:

Browser Binding: the proposal was officially accepted and the majority voted for its release in the v1.1 spec, although there were some concerns raised by Norrie Quinn (EMC) that it would confuse CMIS users with an "optional" binding API and that it would make more sense to make it mandatory, since there appeared to be a sizable demand for this feature.

Coffee Break: had a nice chat with the Stephan Klevenz (SAP), Martin Hermes (SAP), Jens Hübel (Open Text) and David Caruana (Alfresco). David tells me that there is now a CMIS-bridge for Activiti and they have now got Activiti integrated into Alfresco. Brilliant !!! Apparently it's possible to download Activiti, install it and have it up-and-running in less than a minute… Seeing is believing. I'll have to time it when I'm back in the office next week

The meeting began again at 10:50 with Jay Brown opening discussions with the Type Mutability proposal. Olivier asked whether it would be possible to change the attribute of a property. This has not been covered yet. Norrie (EMC) also commented on localization, which Jay (IBM) admitted was something that had not yet been covered by the proposal, but could easily be adapted to do so. Norrie also questioned whether Type Mutability had enough value to be included in the v1.1 specification, to which Jay responded that it was particularly for his team's needs. How would this increase adoption if it would be included in v1.1? It makes it easier for vertical applications to benefit from this feature and should help to solve several namespacing problems.

Decison: the proposal had been previously accepted, so the vote was only for the release version. The majority voted for its release in the v1.1 spec.

Also Legal Holds were also discussed by Martin Hermes (SAP) and the consensus was that we should also work towards including this v1.1, although this is not formally approved yet. Adam Harmetz (Microsoft) would like to have a few of the details investigated further.

Ryan McVeigh (Zia Consulting) asked if anyone would consider volunteering to help with preparing a proposal for workflows. Jay Brown (IBM) suggested that it might be helpful to be able to extend the existing "super" object with CMIS for other scenarios that would be useful for workflow. David Caruana (Alfresco) recommended that we should not go down this route, because in his view it would get complicated quickly and it felt that business workflows should not be a part of the CMIS. Norrie said that he agreed with David's comments and that it was as if business workflows should exist in a completely different layer. Florian Müller (Alfresco) suggested that there should be a formal statement from the CMIS TC why we don't currently support this in the standard. Ryan proposed starting a discussion group to determine and define what was needed to add some basic workflow features. The TC needs a statement on solving this problem.

Lunch and WeWebU's opportunity to take centre stage. Yippee !!! Yes, it's our turn to put forward our Annotations proposal. Admittedly we are in the early stages of this proposal and trying to find our way forward with the committee, but here's our main opportunity to lay on the table to gauge the perspective of the committee. So in an attempt to eat and speak at the same time (which I admit is not advisable) I opened the discussion on our needs for annotations and the need for these to be handled separately from the content and treating them as separate objects that might have policies. I stressed that we were looking for a lightweight CMIS solution that would add little complexity and that we shouldn't overdefine annotations, which might restrict innovation from repository vendors and viewer manufacturers.

Alex continued discussions explaining our 4 possible options currently available to us to implement this. If you're not already familiar with our proposal, you can find it here: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/42214/CMIS%20Annotation%20Proposal_v0.2.docx. Anyhow we proposed either to implement this as an ObjectService extension, a relationship extension, an integration into the secondary types proposal or add a new base type object cmis:annotation (Jay's idea).

There was quite a lot of discussion on this topic and there appeared to be a definite need to address annotations in the CMIS spec, but the question really was which way forward could we go with this. There was a lot of support from both Norrie (EMC) and Jay (IBM). Both IBM P8 and Documentum repositories support annotations and it was opening several questions with their companies how this could be supported by CMIS. David Caruana (Alfresco) wasn't in favor of any of the 4 options and proposed that we considered using renditions as the mechanism to relay annotations to the client. However Alex pointed out that this would not be feasible since renditions are read only and since it should be possible to create, edit and delete annotations at runtime. David Choy interjected and suggested that we should consider adding a 5th option and to spend some time looking at extending CMIS Renditions to incorporate write operations such as create, edit and delete. He also suggested that we should proceed by surveying as many repositories that supported annotations and extracting common semantics from all of these existing systems and modeling a system based on these findings. So there we have it… That's our homework cut out for us for the next few weeks.

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Fri, 27 May 2011 00:11:41 GMT

Down to business again and after a bit of tweeking I can now officially confirm that we finally got OpenWorkdesk working on top of Documentum CMIS.

At 16:00 we got a brilliant CMIS demo of Zia Consulting's client running on an iPhone and an iPad. Very slick presentation from Ryan McVeigh and Gi Lee. A good reason for getting an iPad for me (hint! hint! Rainer & Stefan…) or most likely not

At 16:20 we got a presentation from Seoras Ashby on the Adobe Drive CMIS concept where collaboration works in documents. Adobe Drive is deeply integrated into the product so that when we embed objects (files) from a repository inside documents, such as images in a flyer, the application supporting Adobe Drive (e.g. InDesign) will notify the user and update the object when the object happens to be updated in the repository by another user. Very impressive and quite a lot of similarities to ZIDI (WeWebU product if you didn't know… http://www.wewebu.de/en/products/zero-install-desktop-integration.html). Also Seoras gave us a little introduction to FlashBuilder. If only someone had explained there was such a tool like this a year ago when I tried an Adobe Flash integration on Android, then I might have a few less grey hairs today…

Time to wrap up. A big thanks to Adam Harmetz and to Microsoft for hosting the CMIS Face2Face meeting this year. It has been absolutely fabulous and wonderful to meet all the voices I have heard over the phone in the flesh.

David Caruana (Alfresco) slapped my wrists for misquoting him earlier. Sorry David! He meant we should use renditions as a template for annotations. @David - I'll be in touch about Activiti soon

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:54:26 GMT

So the Face2Face is officially over. Many thanks to David Choy for facilitating the proceedings over the past 3 days, for which I can assure you takes a lot of energy.

David Choy and Norrie Quinn (EMC) are catching a flight tonight and as for the rest of us we are either flying tomorrow or Saturday. We checked with Seoras (Adobe) before leaving Microsoft this evening what the current status of the Icelandic volcano was and it seems to be quiet enough to allow planes to land in the 2 places that were temporarily no-fly zones, namely Scotland (where Seoras is flying to) and Germany (where we want to be in the next 48 hours).

Some of us are meeting up for a farewell meal at Earl's Steak House tonight… Hang on! Didn't we do that place last night? <sarcasm>Well I give the CMIS TC members 10 out of 10 for originality.</sarcasm> Well I'm sure it's to do with the fact that the food was sooooooo good and not that the waitresses just happen to be soooooo unbelievably gorgeous. <sarcasm>Well I weap for those guys who are flying out tonight.</sarcasm>

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:10:34 GMT

Another great evening with Ryan McVeigh (Zia Consulting). This guy really knows good places to visit. After another fantastic evening at Earl's, we went to play billiards nearby and then - so as not to appear like a loser as the previous evening - went on to another bar with Ryan, David Caruana, Gi Lee and Steve Roth. In fact we had a good laugh and met quite a few entertaining people

Re: CMIS Plugfest 2011

unknown-user — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:13:56 GMT

Only a few hours before we fly back to Germany and fortunately no side effects from the previous evening. Off now to have a traditional pancake breakfast before checking out of my hotel.

Have a nice weekend everyone !

Hope to see you again next year at the Face2Face Plugfest where ever that might be