EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced an advanced technology effort with Adobe Systems, Inc. to develop a standards-based interoperable content management infrastructure. The new infrastructure will combine EMC's leading enterprise content management (ECM) platform and Adobe's open standard XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) technology to deliver a powerful solution to maximize distributed information sharing and management, enabling customers to manage data more intelligently and efficiently.

The collaboration will also support the emerging iECM (Interoperable Enterprise Content Management) standard being developed by AIIM (The Association for Information and Image Management), an international organization focused on helping users understand challenges associated with managing documents, content, and business processes. The iECM framework will address the growing need for a common integration layer between different enterprise content management systems and multiple business applications. It will include support for major industry standards such as SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, JCR (JSR-170) and others, organizing them in the context of content-rich application requirements.

"Enterprise customers increasingly want to be able to integrate content into business processes, creating the need for a common set of standards for accessing, exchanging, managing and integrating structured and unstructured content," said Howard Shao, Senior Vice President, EMC Software Group. "EMC's membership and active participation in the AIIM iECM committee, and its joint development efforts with Adobe, demonstrate our commitment to making this a reality for our customers."

"The combination of the open Adobe XMP framework and EMC's comprehensive content management platform represents a powerful solution to deliver information systems for customers to integrate rich content into enterprise workflows," said John Brennan, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at Adobe. "This joint effort represents a strategic opportunity for both companies to work together on advancing metadata standardization and next-generation content and information sharing systems and infrastructures."

Adobe XMP is an extensible and customizable framework that leverages standard XML structures to facilitate distributed information sharing and management. It is a labeling technology that can embed data about a content file -- known as metadata - into the file itself, enabling more innovative job processing, workflow automation and rights management. Through Adobe XMP, metadata can be assigned to content earlier in the information lifecycle and prior to it being stored in the EMC Documentum repository, enabling users to automate the tagging and validation of content more effectively and intelligently.

iECM (Interoperable Enterprise Content Management) is a standards-based framework, initiated by AIIM to address the growing need for a distributed enterprise content management architecture that facilitates content access across formerly disparate repositories. This is achieved through an integration layer that addresses content metadata standardization and includes a suite of web services that provide a common set of operations through which ECM solutions and enterprise applications can interoperate and manage content within a secure environment. In addition to those directly related to web services, the framework will also cover standards for semantic interoperability such as XML and XML Schema, RDF, OWL and Dublin Core. Additional information on this effort is available at www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=29284.