How do you evaluate standards?

PatriciaA

How do you evaluate standards before you adopt them? A standard such as CMIS was developed to work with existing repositories to ensure minimal disruption. When do you think your organization will start to evaluate CMIS? What steps will you take and what criteria will you use? Let us know...

Pie

I'm going to answer this now before I look at the standard. That will give the most honest answer.

At first blush, I am very pleased. I like the vendor support. There is a lot of activity out there today from the vendors. We need to see that same level of commitment in 6 months. To adopt a standard, the key players need to all support the standard, or at least enough of them so that the market forces the few laggards to comply.

The other aspect is can the standard actually solve the problem in the correct way. Correct is a loose term. For CMIS, it revolves around security and extensibility. Can it handle the security concerns of the applications that utilize it? Can it be extended so that if one vendor has an uncovered feature, it can be exposed?

Finally, I'm going to look at the design and underlying technologies. This will take some time and I'll be pulling some team members in to help me. Knowing the players, I'm hopeful that things will turn out well on this front. The first two are my larger focuses for this standard.