A posting from Andy Harjanto on behalf of the Microsoft Active Directory Team announces 'DSML Services for Windows (DSfW)' as Microsoft's implementation of the DSML version 2 specification. Completed in November 2001, the OASIS Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) version 2 was recently voted as an OASIS Standard. According to the market bulletin, DSML "provides a means of representing directory structural information and directory operations as an XML document. The intent of DSML is to allow XML-based enterprise applications to leverage profile and resource information from a directory in their native environment; it allows XML and directories to work together and provides a common ground for all XML-based applications to make better use of directories. For example, in addition to the already standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), many devices and other platforms have other alternatives to communicate with Active Directory." The MS DSML Services for Windows Beta 1 extends the power of the Active Directory service. Its features include a SOAP listener, support for equivalent LDAP operations, session support, IIS security support, connection pooling, and multiple configuration options.

Features: "DSML Services for Windows Beta 1 includes the following features:

• SOAP listener. The SOAP listener component intercepts DSMLv2 requests and sends back corresponding DSMLv2 responses.
• Support for equivalent LDAP operations. The service performs equivalent LDAP operations such as addRequest, modifyRequest, and searchRequest. It also supports advanced operations such as LDAP controls and extended requests.
• Session support. While DSML was designed and based on the request/response protocol, DSML Services for Windows allows users to keep the state between requests by specifying the session ID in the SOAP header. This is useful for some LDAP control operations that may span multiple requests, such as a page-size control.
• IIS security support. The service supports all IIS security configurations, including integrated Windows authentication, basic authentication, basic authentication over secure sockets layer (SSL), and digest authentication.
• Connection pooling. This manages incoming requests and promotes scalability.
• Multiple configuration options. There is support for many different configuration options to optimize the performance of DSML Services for Windows.