Companies invest heavily in Enterprise Content Management platforms. But many still feel they aren”t getting everything out of their ECM systems.

In fact, a recent Information Week Analytics/Intelligent ECM survey, showed that almost 60 percent of respondents said their ECM systems could play an expanded role in the enterprise – if they could be more easily integrated with third-party applications.

This is where the anticipated Content Management Integration Services standard, a web services specification that lets competing content management systems share information, enters the picture.

Perhaps one of the biggest gains achievable from the standard is the overall growth of ECM, according to a report entitled "Silo to Gold Mine: What CMIS Can, and Can”t, Do for ECM Integration."

"For the ECM marketplace to get to the next growth wave, it needs a standard," Razmik Abnous, CTO of the content management and archiving division at EMC said in the study. "ECM platforms need applications. Without those apps, the platform is only half the story."

The top applications those surveyed were included: collaboration software (48 percent), enterprise search (42 percent) and Microsoft Office applications (40 percent)