EMC, IBM, and Microsoft have drafted Content Management Interoperability Services ( CMIS), a proposed standard for a set of web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories. CMIS is designed to solve a difficult business problem—ensuring interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories.

CMIS focuses on the basic content capabilities of an ECM system—the create, read, write, delete, and query functions. When deployed, CMIS ensures interoperability by defining how these core content management capabilities function in a uniform manner over a variety of ECM systems. Beyond this limited (albeit important) set of operations, CMIS does not seek to standardize other capabilities of a content repository. Nor does CMIS seek to standardize the administrative functions supported by each ECM system.