EMC’s developer conference (DevCon) is this week and yesterday I spoke on Standards for Content Management. I’ve spoken on this subject, both at the EMC Software User Conferences (Momentum) and at DevCon for the last two years. Some stats:

Clear trend of this becoming something that the ECM community is interested in.I talked about the Java Content Repository (JCR) which as of May 2005 has an approved version 1.0 and as of fall 2005 also already has an effort underway for a version 2.0, JSR-283. I reviewd the basic object model which can be found in the version 1.0 spec as well as an early proposal considered and rejected by the JSR-283 expert group – the SPI proposal defined an interface to layer over the repository server and placed the exiting JCR on the client side.But then I asked the audience to consider the challenges of the cross-repository application. About the need for an application to span heterogeneous systems, about the desire for rapid development and configuration of composite applications using tools such as BPM and portals. We abosolutely need a standard for content management, as there is a standard for relational databases (model and query). There’s no doubt in my mind that it needs to take a service oriented approach. And I’m equally sure that it is coming, soon.I’m looking forward to next year’s presentations – all co-located at EMC World. Guessing session attendance will again be up.