The WeWebU development team worked hard for the last three quarters in order to make it happen. “We are very proud to ship first deliveries of the latest version of WeWebU OpenWorkdesk to customers and partners”, says Dr. Rainer Pausch, Head of Products & Marketing at WeWebU. “Besides many incremental improvements we concentrated on four main areas which will open new markets to us and shall set us far ahead of the competition”, he adds.

WeWebU OpenWorkdesk 3.0 is compliant with section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act and thus ensures accessibility for handicapped people. This is a prerequisite for entering the huge and very attractive market of governmental institutions especially in the United States of America and Canada. The support of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) is another door opener for new markets since it allows WeWebU OpenWorkdesk to work with content form literally any modern ECM repository that supports this standard. Stefan Waldhauser, CEO of WeWebU is excited: “CMIS the SQL for content management is changing the ECM world – and we are part of it. Now applications build with WeWebU OpenWorkdesk can run on and combine content from such different sources like IBM ECM Systems, Alfresco and even Microsoft SharePoint. This is positive for our customers who now have a much greater choice for their backend system and WeWebU alike, since our potential customer base grows by magnitudes!” In order to bring the documents from all those different systems to the user WeWebU OpenWorkdesk now comes with an Advanced Viewing component that is capable to display literally all documents regardless of origin and format. “Advanced Document Viewing as well as other productivity enhancing features like improved bulk processing of documents, e-mail integration, and stored searches further improve the usability of OpenWorkdesk and thus the efficiency of its users”, concludes Dr. Pausch.

But not only the new features of OpenWorkdesk 3.0 are impressing. Stefan Waldhauser proudly explains: “Along with the development of this release we took two big and important steps that significantly boosted our product quality. First, we introduced the development method SCRUM that enables us every three weeks to create potentially shippable releases of our software that are tested and evaluated by our partners. Second, we went even further by making large parts of OpenWorkdesk open source. At www.openworkdesk.org everybody can download the Community Edition of OpenWorkdesk as well as the source code for tests, evaluation and even real projects. The feedback from both user groups immediately flows back into our development process and enables us to continually apply corrections and improvements.”

WeWebU OpenWorkdesk 3.0 is general available immediately.

About WeWebU Software AG

WeWebU Software AG is the specialist for Enterprise Information Management. With our standard products, enterprises can access their complete information infrastructure via a unified, process-oriented working environment. Thus, they reduce costs, increase their employees’ productivity, come to decisions faster and better, and make their whole enterprise more agile. WeWebU Software AG operates internationally. It cooperates with leading EIM manufacturers and consulting firms and is an IBM Advanced Business Partner as well as Alfresco Systems Integrator & Solutions Partner. The continually growing customer-base of WeWebU Software AG consists of e.g. Bayerischer Rundfunk, SAPERION AG, Siemens AG and DATEV e.G., financial institutions like Hamburger Sparkasse, Sparkasse Bremen, UniCredit Leasing, Visana Group, SUVA and NÜRNBERGER Versicherungsgruppe as well as several US federal and state agencies like the California Department of Public Health.

So this means that the SharePoint Server 2010 now has the functionality to act as as CMIS client and as a CMIS server.

Click here to read the full article at TechNet.

The article deals with the following topics:

• About the CMIS standard and specification
• About the CMIS Producer and CMIS Consumer Web Part
• Installing and configuring CMIS connectors
• Bindings and permissions
• Mapping the CMIS data model to SharePoint concepts

Now I will write something about the developer of this explorer. Nicolas Raoul is 28, French and living in Tokyo.

He has been working at Aegif (Alfresco partner) for one year, the only foreigner in his company. Aegif was founded by ex-Documentum people when Alfresco appeared, and is the exclusive partner in Japan for Alfresco and Liferay. They contribute localizations and answer questions on the Alfresco Japanese forum, among other things.
They have been following the details of CMIS since June 2009. Their blog is actually one of the only Japanese websites talking about CMIS:
http://aegif.typepad.jp/blog (You need to be able to read Japanese )
Struts2CmisExplorer is their second CMIS-based project.

They realized a lot of companies needed a lighter alternative to the complex full-featured web clients that come with ECM products (for instance the “Alfresco Explorer”). Those juggernauts are great for power-users, but employees are usually provided with a lighter, simpler webapp. Clients sometimes also need a simple interface to check “their” documents (bills, reports, etc).

Those interfaces are basically showing the files of a particular directory, embedded into the company’s portal, and are usually developed for a particular ECM product.

So they wanted such a reusable browser, that they could easily integrate into any client’s portal, working with any ECM product. For the repository protocol, the choice was not hard. JCR could have worked, but CMIS is much more promising for document management. Even though most proprietary ECM products don’t support it yet.

For the UI library, they chose Struts2 because it is one of the most widespread enterprise web frameworks. Companies will not be afraid of using Struts2, and chances are they already use it. They brainstormed about the name, from monster names to totally abstract names, but finally settled for Struts2CmisExplorer, a plain and simple concatenation that leaves no ambiguity.

Struts2CmisExplorer was born to be forked. For instance some people will probably need to integrate it with Spring IoC, and Nicolas would love them to create a branch for this. He uses GitHub for source control, which makes branching/merging easy and visual.

About Nicloas: He released his first open source software in 1998, then studied maths and IT. He has worked in 14 countries and speaks 6 languages.
Projects: He worked on the French Air Force’s Document Management system, then on French National Library’s central document management system. He designed a part of the Schengen Information System (Europe polices database), and worked on HTML5 at W3C.

Struts2CmisExplorer is open source and available at http://code.google.com/p/struts2cmisexplorer/.

The CMIS Connector for SharePoint provides a CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services)interface over the top of SharePoint as well as a CMIS consumer Web Part that can be used to display content from other CMIS enabled repositories.

Click here to read the blog post.

WeWebU creates a CMIS-based Open Source version of its OpenWorkdesk – a comprehensive suite of applications for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with an intuitive Web 2.0 front-end. The Open Source edition will support all CMIS-enabled ECM platforms, e.g. Alfresco, and will be released in early July. A fully supported commercial version will also be available under subscription.

The CMIS-based version of WeWebU OpenWorkdesk will be presented soon at various trade shows both in Europe and the US.

Click here to read the whole message.

Happy Birthday WeWebU and thanks for making this freely available.

David is an Alfresco ECM Founding Engineer and Chief Architect. Also he is a OASIS CMIS TC Member. During the video David shows what code is needed to connect to the Alfresco and eXo repositories. You’ll see that it is not that much code

This release includes:
- CMIS 1.0 support
- Multiple repositories support
- CMIS repository switcher block
- CMIS common library client implementation (vendor specifc modules are no longer required. cmis_alfresco is deprecated)
- Synchronization with binary files support
- Flexible synchronization rules
- Folder picker for CMIS browser navigation

Major changes:
- cmis_alfresco module is deprecated
- All admin screens have been removed. Will be addressed in feature releases
- API suffered major changes, in order to match CMIS 1.0 specs
- CMIS document view block has been dropped. Will be addressed in feature releases

Changes from RC2
- Added cmis_sync more complex config sample to README.txt
- Added support for json response to cmis_query view
- Fixed cmis_browser actions for path containing white spaces
- Fixed cmis_folderId sync setting

Changes from RC1
- Fixed cmis_sync filefield support

Click here to download the Drupal CMIS API.

The software is built on the Google Web Toolkit. This allows them to build an interface quickly, and most importantly to separate the backend, repository-specific functionality from the user interface, which allowed the user interface to be reusable for multiple repository types. CARA3 provides full authoring, review, approval and publishing functionality to end users together with.

Coming soon – iCARA – single app for iPhones, Android phone and Blackberries to access any CMIS repository such as Documentum, SharePoint, Alfresco, LiveLink, FileNet and others.

Generis has been a provider of electronic document management software around the world since 1997. Clients range across industries and include Johnson & Johnson, Pratt & Whitney, Citigroup, Dow Corning, the Department of Homeland Security, Total Oil and 3M.

A similar web browser software based on CMIS is the OpenWorkdesk from WeWebU.

The following functions have already been implemented:

Repository Services

• Get Repository Info
• Get Type Definition

Navigation Services

• Get Children
• Get Folder Parent
• Get Object Parents
• Get Checkedout Docs

Discovery Services
Query

Object Services

• Get Object
• Get Object By Path
• Get Properties
• Get Renditions
• Get Content Stream
• Create Document
• Create Folder
• Update Properties
• Move Object
• Delete Object
• Set Content Stream
• Delete Content Stream

Check this page for further details.