Over the last several months I have been working with a number of colleagues, one from the FAA and another from Adobe Systems on a new initiative under the auspices of AIIM – the subject, Interoperable Enterprise Content Management (it took me months before I didn’t stumble trying to say that ;-)) – call it iECM. The official iECM page can be found here – there is a link from that page to several things including a registration form (membership is entirely open to anyone), a newly created blog (that has yet to see any postings but will be spinning up soon) as well as numerous documents produced to date. The iECM site and blog are the official sites for iECM info, however, since this does occupy a great deal of my time these days I’m sure to have more personal opinions to post here as well.In brief, iECM is all about addressing the problem of siloed information stores. We want to be able to find, access and even side-effect content that is stored in a variety of different repositories that offer a variety of different access mechanisms, often mostly proprietary. Attempts to solve this problem in the past have involved the creation and maintenance of suites of application connectors. Recently the JCP has addressed repository access with the Java Content Repository (JCR) specification (initially in JSR-170 and now in the follow-on, JSR-283). While iECM is still in its early stages it looks to share a philosophy with the JSRs listed here and that is that the onus will be placed on the repository vendors to support standardized interfaces, rather than having a third party create connectors. Hmm, I like that. Where JCR and iECM are not the same is several-fold:

• JCR is a Java interface (though I’ll say right here and now that certainly the models developed as a part of JCR are candidates to leave the Java realm.)
• iECM seems to be playing in the SOA arena (later threads to debate exactly what that means)
• JCR addresses repository access.
• The scope for iECM (pending group consensus) seems to be moving in the direction of going beyond repository access capabilities.

This is going to be seriously fun!!