James Tauber recently reported that the OASIS DSML Technical Committee had received two new technical submissions from participating companies that will "re-energize" committee work on DSML version 2.0. Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) is an XML markup lanuage which enables applications to "capture the scalability, replication, security and management strengths of directory services." Novell has decided to donate its DirXML work to the DSML TC, and the 'DirXML NDS DTD' is available for review. DirXML is based on NDS eDirectory, Novell's "secure directory service which can publish information to -- or accept information from -- any application or directory for which it has a specific driver. DirXML includes drivers for the Lotus Notes, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, NDS, and Netscape LDAP." Access360 has also developed a "Directory Access Markup Language" XML DTD relevant to DSML. The iPlanet's XMLDAP Gateway tool which now supports DSML is available online, and Microsoft is expected to contribute a proposal for the design of DSML 2.0.

From Novell: "DirXML uses XML in three ways. (1) XML documents stored in the directory are used to contain configuration information for the DirXML driver shim that communicates with a particular application. Configuration information might include the server with whom the driver shim is to communicate authentication credentials for the application, etc. (2) XML documents stored in the directory are used to define rules that control the processing of data change events in applications and the directory. (3) Data change events from the directory and from applications are represented using XML documents. Commands instructing the applications or the directory to change data for synchronization purposes are represented using XML documents. The power of XML is fully utilized by the manner in which DirXML uses the rules configured for an application to process a data change event originating from either the application or from the directory. Each DirXML rule performs a transformation on the XML document that contains the data change event. The result of processing a data change event by a series DirXML rules is that an XML document containing a data change event is transformed into an XML document containing one or more commands. The commands are applied to the target (directory or application) to effect the necessary changes to synchronize the data of interest..."