Last week at SUSE we had a hackweek... For those who don't know what it is, the idea is to have us developers work during one work week on any project we want. Earlier in the year the idea has been raised to implement a LibreOffice connector for Alfresco as our documentation team uses it. We even had a meeting with Alfresco people, but the conclusion was obvious: LibreOffice needs to handle the CMIS interface... that's what I started during that hackweek.

Of course I didn't have time to have a feature-complete support of CMIS in only one week, but at least I managed to read some document on an Apache Chemistry InMemory test server at the end of the week. To make it easier, I started to write a C++ library to handle CMIS that can be found on http://sf.net/p/libcmis/. In order for LibreOffice to handle CMIS, I started writing a new Universal Content Provider (UCP) and created a fake URL scheme to access the documents. For example on master, you can open the content of the node #133 using the AtomPub CMIS binding with that kind of URL: cmis+atom://localhost:8080/inmemory/atom/?repo-id=A1&id=133.

The only way to get a CMIS document that works for sure at the moment is to provide the URL to the soffice.bin process... but of course this will need some more love to get a proper UI for it.