Preface

It was early 2012 (Q1), long past the OASIS approval of CMIS 1.0 as a standard. Due to my work on the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) since 2008, I had become a sort of hub for CMIS support within IBM, but over the last year this role had begun to snowball. By looking at my inbox each morning, it was quickly becoming clear to me that answering internal and customer CMIS questions could end up being a full-time job if the volume increase continued. I figured this must also be the case for many of my TC colleagues.

It should have been obvious to me before then, but it wasn’t. Not until a few customers and other IBMers had asked, “When will there be a book about CMIS?” did I realize the time had come. I needed to talk to Florian about getting a lineup of authors together to approach this subject. One thing I knew for sure is that his participation would be critical. Probably a third of the internal support questions I received about Apache Chemistry had to be deferred to him already. Hands down, nobody knew as much about OpenCMIS as he did, and he was turning out to be a very important library to IBM and our customers.

Florian and I had a few meetings about this, and we decided that it would be nice to have two more authors to help shoulder the load, because this book would have to cover a lot of ground (we were guessing more than 500 pages), and we both had day jobs.