XML News

This XML Industry News section consists mainly of links to company press releases announcing support for XML/XSL/XLink/XQuery etc. Other documents with reference collections:

• Main "What's New" Column
• XML Industry News October - December 2003
• XML Industry News July - September 2003
• XML Industry News April - June 2003
• XML Industry News January - March 2003
• XML Industry News October - December 2002
• XML Industry News July - September 2002
• XML Industry News April - June 2002
• Earlier press collections

Major articles on XML in the trade magazines, as well as the more substantive refereed articles on XML in technical publications, are listed in the dedicated database sections: Current XML Surveys and Overview Articles

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• [March 31, 2004] "OASIS WSRP Interop Demo Showcases New Portal Standard for Aggregating Content. BEA, Citrix, Gluecode, IBM, Oracle, Plumtree, and Others Demonstrate Web Services for Remote Portlets OASIS Standard at Delphi Enterprise On-Demand Summit." - "Seven vendors collaborated to showcase interoperability of the recently approved OASIS Standard, Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), at today's Delphi Group Enterprise On-Demand Summit. Members of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee demonstrated the use of WSRP to enable user-driven integration, by aggregating content from various sources and across multiple platforms. Together, they showed how portlets can be reused on portals via WSRP rather than requiring each portal to separately install a complete set of portlets. WSRP maximizes both control and availability for the portlet hosting site while minimizing costs for the remote portal sites. 'With WSRP, users browse through libraries of content and information resources, bringing them into portals and other applications through 'plug-and-play' integration,' explained Nathaniel Palmer, analyst for the Delphi Group. 'The WSRP OASIS Standard offers the opportunity to greatly reduce the cost of integration, without jeopardizing the integrity of information and content repositories.' In the OASIS WSRP Interop Demo, content from portlets running on five different platforms, including .NET, was aggregated and interacted with in a manner equal to that of locally hosted portlets. BEA, IBM, Oracle, and Plumtree provided test implementations of a WSRP Consumer within their portal servers. 'Without WSRP, this would require manual coding of integration points between portal vendors,' noted Rich Thompson of IBM, chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. 'With WSRP, portlet repositories continue to be maintained by the appropriate administrators, but the resources they provide are accessible to non-technical business users'..." General references: "Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)."

• [March 29, 2004] "ISO Approves ebXML OASIS Standards. ebXML Suite of Technical Specifications Promises to Cut Costs and Simplify Processes for e-Business." - "The International Standards Organization (IS0) has approved a suite of four ebXML OASIS Standards that enable enterprises in any industry, of any size, anywhere in the world to conduct business over the Internet. The submissions from OASIS will be published as ISO technical specifications, ISO/TS 15000. The new ISO 15000 designation, under the general title, Electronic business eXtensible mark-up language, includes four parts, each corresponding to one of ebXML's modular suite of standards: [1] ISO 15000-1: ebXML Collaborative Partner Profile Agreement; [2] ISO 15000-2: ebXML Messaging Service Specification; [3] ISO 15000-3: ebXML Registry Information Model; [4] ISO 15000-4: ebXML Registry Services Specification. Until now, the technology available for most businesses to exchange data was electronic data interchange (EDI), which made significant contributions to productivity and inventory control. Many companies, however, find EDI expensive and difficult to implement. The ebXML initiative, using the economies of scale presented by the Internet, breaks through these obstacles. ebXML provides companies with a standard method to exchange business messages, conduct trading relationships, communicate data in common terms and define and register business processes. It aims to make it easier for organizations to interface with others within and outside their industry, open up new markets with less effort than before and, at the same time, cut costs and simplify process associated with traditional document exchange. 'ISO/TS 15000 underscores the importance of partnership between ISO and standards-developing organizations as OASIS to craft a common set of standards and reflects the international community's recognition of the importance of ebXML in enabling electronic business,' said Alan Bryden, ISO Secretary-General. 'We applaud the developers of ebXML within OASIS and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) for their contributions to open trade data interchange and harmonization.' 'ISO approval is a gratifying endorsement of both ebXML and the OASIS open standards process,' noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. 'ISO designation makes the already widely adopted ebXML standards even more accessible to adopters —particularly those implementing business solutions for governments — who look to ISO for assurance of long term viability.' John Borras, Director Technology Policy, U.K. Office of the e-Envoy, characterized the ISO approval as 'a milestone for domestic and international electronic trade. Government agencies, users, and trade organizations can specify ebXML compliance with even greater confidence.' ISO/TS 15000 was approved by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 154, Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration..." General references in "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)."

• [March 23, 2004] "XyEnterprise Announces Support for XSL-FO and a Web-Based Style Editor for XML Professional Publisher. New Offerings, Enhancements Create Significant Advantages for Standards-Based Publishing." - "XyEnterprise, the leading developer of XML content management and enterprise publishing software, announced today a new style creation tool and support for XSL-FO in its leading XML publishing software — XML Professional Publisher (XPP). XPP is used for automated and interactive publishing in XML publishing environments, providing unmatched support for XML content, automated rendering, and Web Services integration. The new features will enable customers to enjoy further productivity gains and standards support from the world's leading automated publishing engine. XSL-FO, a recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is a standard way to describe rules for formatting XML content. XPP will apply an XSL stylesheet to an XML instance, and use this information to render XML content to Postscript or PDF output. Users will have access to the robust and unmatched publishing capabilities of XPP that supplement the XSL-FO standard, including the ability to interactively edit the formatted file, control the placement of graphics, and apply sophisticated controls for page and column balancing, hyphenation and justification, and complex tabular formatting... The new style creation and management interface, based on XPP's Web Services layer, presents a browser-based look and feel for creating and managing style information. The interface simplifies the selection of style choices and enhances the ability to use, modify, and apply styles. The Style Editor enables users to access style information in an intuitive point-and-click fashion, use existing styles as a basis for new styles, and re-use style settings across many XML documents. Because this is a Web Services interface, customers can configure or customize which features and functionality related to style management and publishing can be accessed by end users. This will reduce learning curves and enable more users to access the power and productivity offered by XPP. Mark Walter, Senior Analyst for the Seybold Consulting Group, stated: 'This new functionality advances the state of the art in standards-based publishing in two ways. First, it combines the capability to handle XML documents — from simple statements through complex typeset materials — with the proven publishing capabilities of XPP. Second, it embraces the services-oriented architecture that both corporate and commercial publishers are adopting. The XyEnterprise Style Editor exposes the rich functionality of the XPP composition engine to a broader base of users in the enterprise without compromising a graphic services department's ability to configure and control the implementation'..." See: (1) "XSL/XSLT Software Support"; (2) "Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL/XSLT)."

• [March 18, 2004] "Intel Joins the Liberty Alliance Project. Membership Underscores Intel's Commitment to Advance Open Standards Development." - "The Liberty Alliance Project today announced that Intel Corporation has joined the global consortium developing an open federated identity standard and business tools for implementing identity-based services, as both a sponsor member and participating company on the Alliance's Management Board. As a Liberty Alliance member, Intel will continue its efforts towards the evolution of additional devices that can take advantage of Liberty Alliance compliant infrastructure and services. Liberty's federated approach to identity management provides a standards-based foundation for identity networks and services. By identity-enabling systems and services, companies can increase security, create new efficiencies to cut internal IT costs, enable new business opportunities and make Web services more privacy friendly. Identities play a large role in the convergence between computing and communications, which is an evolution Intel has been driving for many years. Intel has worked hard to advance basic building blocks both at the silicon level as well as at the platform hardware/software level. Joining Liberty Alliance will help Intel continue to advance the development of identity standards that will become one of the basic building blocks for emerging computing and communications usage models. 'Authentication and identity management are critical to the success of new computer and communications usages,' said Colin Evans, Director System Software, Corporate Technology Group, Intel. 'Liberty Alliance brings together an exciting array of companies from many industries to define these standards and we are looking forward to working with our customers and member companies to make implementation a reality across all the hardware platforms we provide.' In addition, as the newest member on the Management Board, Intel is one of 15 companies responsible for overall governance and operations of the Liberty Alliance. This new membership status will allow Intel the opportunity to work with the Liberty Alliance membership to assist in the creation and recommendation of future specifications and business tools in the area of federated identity..." General references in "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [March 17, 2004] "WS-I Completes Basic Profile 1.0 Deliverables with Availability of Testing Tools. Basic Profile 1.0 Testing Tools Assess Compliance. WS-I Now Sets Sights on Interoperability for Web Services Security." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') today announced the general availability of its testing tools for the assessment of Web services' interoperability with the WS-I Basic Profile. Final versions of the Web Service Communication Monitor and the Web Service Profile Analyzer are now available on the WS-I website... With C# and Java tools implementations available there is a version for every Web services platform. The news was announced at the WS-I Spring Community Meeting taking place this week in Vancouver... The Web Service Communication Monitor ('Monitor') captures messages exchanged with Web services, and stores these messages for analysis by the second tool, the Web Service Profile Analyzer ('Analyzer'). The Analyzer evaluates messages captured by the Monitor, and also validates the description and registration artifacts of the Web service. These artifacts include the WSDL document(s) that describes the Web service, the XML schema files that describe the data types used in the WSDL service definition, and the UDDI registration entries. More than 300 test cases have been written and automated for the Analyzer tool. Each test case exercises between 50 and 90 test procedures. The output from the Analyzer is a report that indicates whether or not a Web service meets the interoperability guidelines of the WS-I Basic Profile. The report provides details on the specific deviations and failures, so that users know which requirements of the WS-I Basic Profile were not met... Having completed the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 deliverables, WS-I is currently working to develop interoperability guidelines to address attachments and Web services security. In December, WS-I published drafts of the Basic Profile 1.1, Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0 and the Attachments Profile 1.0 for public review. In addition, the Basic Security Profile Working Group expects to publish a draft of the Basic Security Profile early next quarter. The Basic Security Profile will profile the OASIS WS-Security specification and its associated normatively referenced specifications. Last month, WS-I announced the availability of the first Security Scenarios Working Group Draft for public review. This document outlines security risks in building interoperable Web services and countermeasures for these risks..." See details in the news story: "WS-I Releases Final Testing Tools Package for Basic Profile 1.0 Compliance." General references in "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."

• [March 16, 2004] "World Wide Web Consortium Issues VoiceXML 2.0 and Speech Recognition Grammar as W3C Recommendations. Critical Components of the W3C Speech Interface Framework Now Complete." - "Giving voice to the Web, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published VoiceXML 2.0 and Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) as W3C Recommendations. The goal of VoiceXML 2.0 is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications. SRGS is key to VoiceXML's support for speech recognition, and is used by developers to describe end-users responses to spoken prompts. Today's announcement marks the advancement to Recommendation status of the first two specifications in W3C's Speech Interface Framework. Aimed at the world's estimated two billion fixed line and mobile phones, W3C's Speech Interface Framework will allow an unprecedented number of people to use any telephone to interact with appropriately designed Web-based services via key pads, spoken commands, listening to pre-recorded speech, synthetic speech and music... In the W3C Speech Interface Framework, VoiceXML controls how the application interacts with the user, while the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is used for spoken prompts and the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) for guiding the speech recognizers via grammars that describe the expected user responses. Other specifications in the Framework include Voice Browser Call Control (CCXML), which provides telephony call control support for VoiceXML and other dialog systems, and Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, which defines how speech grammars bind to application semantics... The Speech Recognition Grammar Specification — SRGS — allows applications to specify the words and phrases that users are prompted to speak. This enables robust speaker independent recognition. SRGS covers both speech and DTMF input. DTMF input is valuable in noisy conditions or when the social context makes it awkward to speak. Speech recognizers are generally able to report the degree of confidence — that is, the likelihood of having correctly recognized the word or phrase — and may provide the most likely alternatives when the recognizer is uncertain as to which of them the user actually said..." See details in the news story: "VoiceXML 2.0 and Speech Recognition Grammar Published as W3C Recommendations." General references in "VoiceXML Forum."

• [March 16, 2004] "Bowstreet Introduces Portlet Factory. Provides Compatibility with All JSR 168 Compliant Portals. Launches JSR 168 Validation Program with Industry Leaders." - "Bowstreet, a leading provider of development tools for adaptive Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform applications, announced the release of Bowstreet Portlet Factory version 5.8, compatible with all portal platforms that adhere to the JSR 168 standard. Bowstreet Portlet Factory version 5.8, introduced at DCI's Portals, Collaboration & Content Management Conference underway this week in San Francisco, enables the rapid creation of JSR 168 compliant portlets. JSR 168 was developed through the Java Community Process (JCP), the community-based process that designs and revises Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits. It is a standard that ensures a single way to design, build, test, package, and maintain portlets and thereby make those portlets available across a wide range of portals. In addition to launching Bowstreet Portlet Factory, the company also formed the Bowstreet JSR 168 validation program. Through this program, Bowstreet Portlet Factory will undergo validation with all program members' portals. To date, program members include Sun, Plumtree, and IBM. 'Sun's customers are starting to stretch their portal boundaries, looking for new ways to access and process information from their many back-end systems, and present it in a relevant, user-friendly way,' said Stuart Wells, vice president of market development, Sun Microsystems. 'Bowstreet Portlet Factory will help customers transform their portals, giving them a rich, user-adaptive portal experience in a fraction of the development time. Also, by supporting the JSR 168 and J2EE standards, Bowstreet is helping its customers broaden the reach and usefulness of the portlets they build.' 'Our Radical Openness product strategy is a long-term commitment to ensure that our solution is interoperable with customers' existing technologies,' said Glenn Kelman, vice president of product management and marketing, Plumtree. 'Supporting Bowstreet in its JSR 168 portlet validation initiative, together with other activities such as launching the Portlet Open Source Trading Site with Documentum and BEA last November, is part of our effort to ensure our software works with the widest range of platforms and tools in the industry.' Bowstreet simultaneously released version 5.8 of Portlet Factory for WebSphere, which provides direct, deep integration with IBM's WebSphere Portal APIs, in addition to integration through JSR 168. 'IBM continues to take a leadership role in defining and adopting standards, like JSR 168,' said Bill Swatling, product manager, WebSphere Portal, IBM. 'Bowstreet Portlet Factory's support of JSR 168 will give our customers an additional, standards-compliant tool they can use to develop and deploy portlets on WebSphere Portal.' 'Bowstreet's customers have realized significant benefits with our portlet development tools in terms of time and cost savings. We are now able to offer the same powerful development tools and solid value proposition to all standards-compliant portal users,' said Michael George, president and CEO, Bowstreet. 'In the next few weeks, we will be announcing new customers that have already selected Portlet Factory to develop and deploy portlets on a variety of portal platforms'..." See also references in See also "Portlet Open Source Trading (POST) Site for JSR 168 and WSRP Portlets."

• [March 15, 2004] "Global eXchange Services Provides Philippines Bureau of Customs With Automated Customs Clearance Solution. RosettaNet Solution to Reduce Clearance Cycle Times and Transaction Costs." - "Global eXchange Services, Inc. today announced its selection to provide a RosettaNet-based automated customs clearance solution to the Philippines Bureau of Customs in Manila. The pilot implementation and connectivity testing are already underway, with the production system planned to go live in early 2004. The RosettaNet eCustoms Declaration Milestone Program initiative is focused on improving cycle time associated with customs clearance, including the generation and processing of shipping information required to move products through the customs process. RosettaNet's Partner Interface Process (PIP) Shipping Documentation 3B18 enables high-tech industry manufacturers, along with their freight forwarders and customs brokers, to send secure, RosettaNet Internet-based customs transactions directly to the Bureau of Customs' Automated Customs Operating System (ACOS), reducing both clearance cycle times and transaction costs. 'We are pleased to provide our customers with logistics solutions that reduce costs and improve the efficiency of global value chains. The Philippines eCustoms implementation is another example of RosettaNet solutions from Global eXchange Services that enable lower cost trading community integration for partners participating in the high-tech value chain,' said Ben Wong, Global eXchange Services' vice president of Asia-Pacific. Following a successful Malaysia implementation, the RosettaNet Philippines pilot involves movement of goods between Intel and Amkor Anam, with Exel Logistics providing freight forwarder and customs brokerage services. RosettaNet Philippines managing director Lito Zulaybar cited the progress in the RosettaNet eCustoms Program implementation as a major industry breakthrough with significant results being achieved in less than 12 months. 'The ability to facilitate trade, while reducing cycle times and costs, on both local and global levels, is a true indicator of RosettaNet's benefit to the industry,' said SY Foong, RosettaNet vice president of Asia. 'By further automating and standardizing the customs declaration process, companies will have the ability to conduct business through countless ports of entry and exit, in any country, with a single customs declaration form'..." See also: (1) "RosettaNet"; (2) RosettaNet PIPs; (3) "Uniform Code Council (UCC) XML Program."

• [March 10, 2004] "AT&T WebService Connect Simplifies Integration Across the Networked Enterprise. Thomson Financial Sets New Standard in Financial Services Industry With Adoption of Innovative Service." - "AT&T today introduced an Internet-based business services network that dramatically reduces the cost, risk and complexity of integrating the networked enterprise across suppliers, partners and customers, enabling true interoperability and collaboration. AT&T WebService Connect leverages the ubiquity of the Web to help companies and government agencies easily and securely connect, create, share and manage business processes and applications with their suppliers and customers. The service creates an environment or platform, called a service-oriented architecture, where applications can be developed by enterprises or third parties, incorporated into a business process, and then shared on demand across the extended enterprise... AT&T WebService Connect is a comprehensive solution that delivers a fully secure, managed platform for businesses to share their critical services and information with partners and customers to drive additional revenue and efficiencies in their businesses. Because the service is based on open standards, companies can easily and securely share information, regardless of the diverse systems and applications used by their suppliers and customers... Thomson Financial, an operating unit of The Thomson Corporation and leading provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community, is one of the first customers of the new AT&T service... Point-to-Point connections only work for a small set of isolated relationships. Once the number of relationships and interconnections increases, this approach quickly becomes exponentially more complex, and ongoing changes become inflexible. Industry-specific communities sometimes provide limited ability to reach outside the boundaries of a specific industry. In some cases, a large percentage of customers are not part of the pre-defined industry. AT&T WebService Connect delivers an end-to-end, integration solution based on the award-winning business services network from San Francisco-based Grand Central Communications. By subscribing to the AT&T service, businesses benefit from a solution based on open standards, which lowers the total cost of ownership and allows them to communicate with all their partners and customers, regardless of their technical infrastructure. The Web-based business services network provides a framework for companies to rapidly and flexibly establish trusted connections with their diverse business units, partners and customers, without adding infrastructure. Connectivity to the network can be established with any application supporting Internet communications via the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), version 1.1, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and the Electronic Data Interchange-Internet Integration (EDIINT) AS2 protocol. In addition, the service provides Web service gateways for exchanging data via additional Internet protocols, including Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). No particular brand of software is required to connect an application with the network as long as the application employs one of the supported open communication standards..."

• [March 08, 2004] "Adobe Launches Public Beta of New XML/PDF Form Design Software. Adobe Designer Delivers Powerful Capabilities for Easy Creation and Deployment of Intelligent Documents in PDF." - "Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the public beta availability of Adobe Designer, a new point-and-click graphical XML form design tool for designing and deploying intelligent forms in Adobe PDF or HTML. The software enables organizations to build solutions using Adobe document services for automating form-based workflows and accelerating access to business-critical information. 'Adobe Designer supports organizations as they migrate to Web services and XML,' said Robert Glushko, Ph.D., with the School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley. 'Creating new data connections with XML is straightforward and intuitive because the software lets you drag and drop form elements based on an XML schema. With Designer, even relatively novice users can create interactive, professional quality forms and connect them to backend systems.' Adobe Designer is part of Adobe's Intelligent Document Platform for generating, collaborating, processing and securing intelligent documents in the enterprise. The software provides all the capabilities needed to design forms with precision, including the ability to import information from existing formats, and define business logic on the form template. Developers can easily integrate form data with core enterprise systems via XML, OLEDB and web services. Additionally, Adobe Designer allows users to design forms that can be used with digital signature technologies for facilitating secure electronic transactions. The software is a desktop design tool that creates XML form templates for publishing to multiple formats, or users can import and add intelligence to existing form templates from PDF or Microsoft Word. Adobe Designer forms dynamically resize according to data input and only present the relevant form fields to the end user based on that input. For example, a single person applying for a mortgage will only be presented with form fields relevant to his or her status. These intelligent forms are accessed via a web browser, Adobe Acrobat or the ubiquitous Adobe Reader. 'To fully realize their investment in enterprise applications, organizations must extend the reach of these applications with processes that enable the secure capture, exchange and track information,' said Ivan Koon, senior vice president of the Intelligent Document Business Unit at Adobe. 'To meet these challenges, Adobe Designer offers a dynamic interface to end users that utilizes XML to create flexible, intelligent documents, while enabling interactive data capture and business collaboration via PDF for efficient, reliable, secure information exchange.' When combined with other document services from Adobe, the Adobe Designer enables organizations to extend core systems and automate business processes easily with internal and external users. From internal forms such as expense reports and purchase requisitions, to external forms such as applications and claims, Adobe's solutions enable enterprises to harness the power of PDF and XML for integrating intelligent documents into the IT environment..."

• [March 08, 2004] "New Teros Gateway Provides Production-Ready Protection for Safe Deployment of Web Services Teros Secure Application Gateway Unifies XML and HTML Security to Protect Against Application Attack and Misuse." - "Teros, the company that secures web infrastructures from application-level attacks, today announced a new version of its award-winning Teros Secure Application Gateway that delivers learning-based XML attack protection for safely deploying web services today. The Teros Gateway is the only appliance that simultaneously protects XML and HTML applications, while preventing the disclosure of private data that can lead to identity theft. This integrated protection eliminates the need to deploy and manage a separate security infrastructure to protect new or existing web services applications. These new XML security capabilities are available at no additional cost on all Teros Gateways. 'Traditional security infrastructures were not designed, and as such are unable, to adequately protect web services from attack,' said Ray Wagner, research director, information security strategies at research firm Gartner. 'Many enterprises are deploying web services alongside traditional web applications. Integrated products that enforce security policies across both types of applications hold the potential to reduce capital expenditures and deliver more consistent security.' Web services are vulnerable to many of the same threats as HTML applications, including buffer overflows, SQL injection, and denial of service attacks, and are even more attractive targets for hackers since they often connect directly to mission-critical databases and back office applications. To secure web services and the data they access, the Teros Gateway combines advanced application learning, identity theft protection and application-layer attack defenses... Teros' adaptive learning engine learns the XML messages and data types received by applications with WSDL (Web Services Description Language) interfaces. Once correct behavior is learned, the Teros Gateway recommends constraints on application inputs to prevent attackers from inserting unexpected or malicious data that could compromise the web service. For example, the Teros Gateway will block the submission of a script to a web services port if that interface port is only expecting accounts numbers. By learning correct application behavior and controlling application inputs, the Teros Gateway protects against both known and unknown attacks... For web services applications that handle sensitive data such as credit card numbers, social security numbers and account numbers, the Teros Gateway ensures these data objects are never compromised by an application attack. Teros' family of SAFE modules detects the presence of protected data types in application responses and can remove or mask the information before it is disclosed. This capability is critical for organizations that are planning to broadly expose legacy mainframe or client/server applications to the Internet via web services interfaces..."

• [March 01, 2004] "Successful SAML V1.1 Interop Lab at RSA2004 Conference." - [Rob Philpott, RSA Security Inc.]: "... some news regarding the SAML interoperability lab we held during the RSA2004 conference. The lab was hosted by RSA and sponsored by the General Services Administration (GSA) of the US government and by Sun Microsystems, who provided 19' LCD monitors for everyone to use... We had eleven vendors participating in the interop. We also had Enspier Technologies participating under contract to GSA. The vendors that participated in the event were Computer Associates, DataPower Technology, Entegrity Solutions, Entrust, Hewlett-Packard, Oblix, OpenNetwork, Ping Identity, RSA Security, Sun Microsystems, and Trustgenix. There were two key goals for the interop. First, we wanted to demonstrate SAML 1.1 interoperability for both Web SSO profiles and for general queries. The other main goal was to show an interoperable implementation of the GSA eGov program's eAuthentication architecture that builds on top of SAML. Also, given that the major change for SAML 1.1 dealt with improving XML DSIG interoperability, we certainly wanted to demonstrate this in the process... All vendors except DataPower implemented the Web SSO use cases, providing both the SAML 1.1 Web SSO Profile and eAuthentication demo scenarios. All of these vendors supported the Browser/Artifact Profile and all but two supported the Browser/POST Profile. Enspier provided a portal that implemented the additional exchanges defined by the eGov program's eAuthentication architecture. Each vendor implemented the AP and RP sides of these exchanges during the lab. The portal was also enhanced to support the generic SAML demo as well. The SAML query use case was demonstrated by DataPower who implemented a simple web services-based demo utilizing SAML 1.1 Attribute Queries to the RSA Attribute Authority... The interop testing proved that the SSTC's goal of producing a quality SAML V1.1 specification that improved interoperability was convincingly achieved. We found no defects in the V1.1 standard..." See: (1) "OASIS SAML Interoperability Event Demonstrates Single Sign-On at RSA Conference"; (2) general references in "Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)."

• [February 27, 2004] "Liberty Alliance Delivers Mobile Business Guidelines for Federated Identity Deployments. Liberty's Open Standard Paves the Way for Identity-Based Mobile Services." - "The Liberty Alliance has released its second business guideline document, outlining near-term market opportunities and business requirements for federated identity in the mobile market. The document examines how mobile operators, equipment providers, content and service providers as well as vendors and users can take advantage of the growth and demand for mobile services, and in turn, how Liberty's open standard can enable secure delivery of Web services. 'Federated identity has the potential to bring mobile networks and personalized services to the next level,' said Paola Tonelli, member of the Liberty Alliance management board and senior director of industry advocacy at Vodafone. 'However, federated identity is about more than just technology. The best practices and business guidelines that Liberty is delivering can help companies overcome some of the more complex challenges associated with federated identity deployments, such as privacy and security issues.' The mobile business guidelines, a Tier 2 document in Liberty's evolving library of business guidelines for federated identity deployment, expands on Liberty's Tier 1 overview delivered July 2003. Additional Tier 2 guidelines are in development with expected delivery later this year... Federated identity, which securely links and manages identity information among different systems, offers a number of benefits to the mobile industry: (1) For service providers, it helps authenticate who the user is, what he or she can access, and at the user's request, quickly gather preferences to deliver personalized services. (2) For operators, it provides an open framework for identity data roaming within and across global networks, allowing them to easily deliver revenue-generating services to more customers. (3) For consumers and businesses, it means they have access to valuable low-cost services from any operator while still retaining control of their information. Liberty Alliance enables these and other benefits, and is the only complete federated identity framework being implemented across the mobile ecosystem today. Liberty's global member base collectively represents more than 200 million mobile subscribers, more than half the world's mobile devices, 80% of all SIMs and 55% of the mobile network infrastructure..."

• [February 25, 2004] "WS-I Publishes Web Services Security Interoperability Guidelines. Security Scenarios Outline Challenges, Threats and Countermeasures." - "Today at the thirteenth annual RSA Conference, the world's leading e-security event, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced the availability of the first Security Scenarios Working Group Draft for public review. Developed by the WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group, the Security Scenarios document identifies security challenges and threats in building interoperable Web services and countermeasures for these risks. The news was announced today during a media event at RSA featuring Web services security experts from the WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group. The Security Scenarios document describes several security challenges, threats and countermeasures in building interoperable Web services, as well as usage scenarios and solutions, including: (1) Challenges: describes several security challenges, including ensuring data integrity, data confidentiality and message uniqueness; (2) Threats: outlines 10 threats on these challenges, such as message alteration, falsified messages, message replay and denial of service attacks; (3) Countermeasures: recommends how technologies like HTTPS and OASIS Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security 1.0 can be used to counter some of these threats; (4) Usage Scenarios and Solutions: describes how these technologies can be used with the Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) that have been used in WS-I deliverables such as the Basic Profile 1.0 Sample Applications..." See details in the news story: "WS-I Releases Public Working Draft Document on Security Scenarios." General references in "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."

• [February 24, 2004] "DMTF Announces New Working Group for Utility Computing. OASIS, GGF and Industry Leaders Join Forces with DMTF to Further Management Standards for Utility Computing." - "Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. today [2004-02-17] announced the formation of the new Utility Computing Working Group, which will create interoperable and common object models for utility computing services within the DMTF's Common Information Model (CIM). Active participants in the working group include Cisco Systems, EMC, HP, IBM, Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and VERITAS Corporation, with the full support of the DMTF's more than 110 member companies. The DMTF Utility Computing Working Group will operate in close collaboration with other organizations, like the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee, to develop standards related to utility computing. The result of this collaboration is to unify the industry on a set of highly functional and extensible management interfaces, enabling multiple vendors to interoperate and fulfill customer requirements for greater management automation. Improved multi-vendor integration will ultimately reduce the costs related to the management of IT resources. 'Management plays a central role in utility computing, and DMTF's CIM is already being used to address this space,' said Todd Guay of Oracle Corp., vice president of technology for the DMTF. 'The new DMTF Utility Computing Working Group will bring together the leaders of the industry to develop further improvements to CIM, meeting IT needs in this important and evolving area.' 'This is an important activity and we are excited to see the DMTF bring this group together, while simultaneously tapping related efforts, such as GGF's Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and several new GGF research groups focused on commercial enterprise Grid application use cases and requirements,' said Charlie Catlett, Senior Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and Chair of GGF. 'The collaboration will deliver the usability the industry requires, and provide standards that capitalize on existing efforts to deliver the management capabilities that will be essential to creating the tools and frameworks necessary for utility computing.' 'The DMTF is responding to a critical need for usable models and common, interoperable standards for the management industry and now for utility computing,' said Heather Kreger of IBM, co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee. 'Collaborating with the OASIS WSDM Technical Committee and other groups on standards development will result in standards that converge to address end-to-end management needs. The OASIS WSDM Technical Committee will be appointing liaisons to the DMTF's Utility Computing Working Group, and we look forward to helping meet the needs of the industry through this effort'..." See: (1) the Working Group charter; (2) general references in "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)."

• [February 23, 2004] "Liberty Alliance White Paper Outlines Federated Identity's Ability to Reduce Identity Theft." - "The Liberty Alliance today announced the availability of a white paper calling out the growing problem of identity theft and detailing ways in which federated identity and Liberty's open standard can reduce online identity theft, its frequency and its potential impact on consumers. The white paper, The Liberty Alliance Protocol and Identity Theft White Paper, also presents deployment recommendations for federated identity as a means to further mitigate risks. Identity theft is a widespread and costly problem. Research analyst firm IDC reports that worldwide economic losses due to identity theft could reach $2 trillion by 2005 (April 2003). It's not only costly, it's time-consuming and a productivity drain on the economy. A U.S. Federal Trade Commission survey reports that in 2003 individuals spent an average of 30 hours to deal with their identity theft experience. 'Identity theft is extremely painful to consumers and very costly for businesses,' said Piper Cole, chair of Liberty's public policy expert group and vice president for global public policy at Sun Microsystems. 'It is costing merchants billions a year in charge-back fees and litigation and they are in need of an immediate solution to alleviate the bleed. Liberty's federated identity framework is a part of that solution.' Liberty's federated identity model, which distributes identity information across various trusted parties, is inherently more secure than a centralized model where all information is accessible in one location. If a centralized database is breached, the entire content of that database can be a goldmine for hackers and thieves. In addition to the federation safeguards, Liberty's framework also incorporates unique privacy controls and state-of-the-art security mechanisms to protect users and businesses..." General references in "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [February 23, 2004] "Application Security Leaders Announce Support for AVDL OASIS Committee Draft. Cenzic, Citadel, Department of Energy CIAC, GuardedNet, NetContinuum, Qualys, SPI Dynamics, Teros and WhiteHat Among Growing Number of Organizations to Support AVDL." - "Leading application security vendors and organizations Cenzic, Citadel, Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC), GuardedNet, NetContinuum, Qualys, SPI Dynamics, Teros and WhiteHat Security, today announced support for the new Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) developed by the OASIS international standards consortium. Growing vendor adoption of AVDL gives security professionals far more freedom and flexibility in managing application security risk and securing critical resources. AVDL enables application security products from different vendors to easily and rapidly share data about security vulnerabilities. As originally promised, less than one year after its initial proposal, the OASIS AVDL Technical Committee (TC) has completed the 1.0 specification. 'Application vulnerabilities propagate so rapidly today that the old methods of dealing with them no longer suffice,' said John Pescatore, vice president at Gartner. 'New standards like AVDL offer one of the best hopes of breaking this cycle by dramatically reducing the time between the discovery of a new vulnerability and the effective response at enterprise sites.' AVDL addresses the business problem of how companies manage ongoing application security risk on a day-to-day basis. With application vulnerabilities now accounting for 75 percent of all attacks, companies have begun deploying a host of next-generation security tools to find application vulnerabilities, block application-layer attacks, patch systems and manage application security events. AVDL enables end users to take this protection one step further by enabling seamless communication between application security products at all stages of the application lifecycle. Several vendors will be demonstrating AVDL interoperability of their products at the 2004 RSA Conference to highlight the growing maturity and commercial viability of AVDL automation..." See also the news story "OASIS Committee Draft for the Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL)."

• [Febuary 20, 2004] "Sun Microsystems and SupplyScape Offer Comprehensive RFID Package to Help Combat Drug Counterfeiting and Diversion. Integrated RFID Offering Safeguards Pharmaceutical Supply Chain." - "Sun Microsystems, Inc. and SupplyScape Corporation announced today a Pharmaceutical Anti-Counterfeit RFID Package, an offering enabling companies in the pharmaceutical supply chain to combat counterfeiting and diversion while gaining efficiencies throughout the supply chain. The offering addresses recommendations announced yesterday by the FDA Counterfeit Drug Task Force, as outlined in its 'Combating Counterfeit Drugs' report... According to the FDA report, 'RFID technology will make the copying of medications either extremely difficult or unprofitable.' Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, coupled with the Electronic Product Code (EPC) and electronic pedigrees are key elements in a multi-layered approach to combat the growing problem of counterfeit drugs affecting patient safety in the United States. The SupplyScape on Sun offering supports the FDA and State government initiatives targeting counterfeit drugs by providing EPC-enabled RFID solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. 'Visionaries articulate a future in which RFID is ubiquitous and nearly everything is traceable,' said Michael Swenson, research manager of Life Science Insights, an IDC subsidiary. 'However, in this post Internet bubble era, broad visions of eventual pay-offs hold little appeal. It is vitally important that early RFID solutions deliver quick relief for pressing industry problems. Solutions must stand on their own merit and not rely on some future day in which RFID becomes pervasive. This Pharmaceutical Anti-Counterfeit solution appears to fit that profile.' The Pharmaceutical Anti-Counterfeit RFID package is based on Sun Java Enterprise System Software, an open and integrated software system, and Sun's RFID infrastructure software that features self-healing and provisioning and works with leading EPC-enabled readers, including Alien, AWID, Feig, Matrics, Tagsys and Tyco. Sun's EPC-compliant RFID software, combined with SupplyScape's electronic pedigree application, runs on low-cost Sun x86-based platform servers with the Solaris Operating System or Linux. Because all components adhere to the EPCglobal standards, pharmaceutical manufacturers, wholesale distributors, and pharmacies can quickly and cost-effectively add the solution to their current supply chain infrastructure and processes, helping streamline operations and secure the prescription drug delivery chain from counterfeits. 'The EPC-based Pharmaceutical Anti-Counterfeit package presented by SupplyScape and Sun highlights a novel and comprehensive way of addressing the issues of counterfeit drugs and product diversion,' said Robin Koh, Director, MIT Auto-ID Labs. 'They have worked with MIT's Auto-ID Labs, EPCglobal, Federal and State regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry to develop a complete solution that takes into account both regulatory and business requirements'..." See also: (1) "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Resources and Readings"; (2) "Physical Markup Language (PML) for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)."

• [Febuary 20, 2004] "Netegrity to Discuss Next Generation of SAML at RSA Conference." - "Netegrity, Inc., a leading provider of identity and access management solutions, today announced that Prateek Mishra, Director of Technology and Architecture at Netegrity and co-chair of the OASIS SAML Committee, will deliver a presentation at the RSA Conference discussing the next version of SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Mishra's presentation titled 'SAML 2.0: Unified Foundation for Federated Security' will be presented as part of the RSA Conference Standards Track on Tuesday, February 24th at 4:15 pm PT. Netegrity will also be exhibiting at the RSA Conference (Booth #1421) where the company will showcase its identity and access management solutions, including Netegrity's provisioning solution, Netegrity IdentityMinder eProvision. Mishra's presentation will discuss the new features of SAML 2.0 and how it brings together disparate efforts in order to create a single federated security umbrella. SAML 2.0 will build upon SAML 1.0 deployments and integrate with the enhanced functionality of the Liberty ID-FF (Identity Federation Framework) layers. In addition, Mishra will discuss the relationship between SAML 2.0 and other proposed standards, such as WS-Security, and how they jointly provide organizations with a trusted model to enable secure Web services and federation. Netegrity was one of the original creators of the SAML specification and over the last three years has helped to drive industry adoption of SAML, including support for the SAML standard within both the Netegrity SiteMinder Web access management product and the Netegrity TransactionMinder Web services security product. The company also recently shipped Netegrity SiteMinder 6.0 which provides advanced federated security capabilities through enhanced support for SAML..." See (1) the news story: "OASIS SAML Interoperability Event Demonstrates Single Sign-On at RSA Conference"; (2) "Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)."

• [February 13, 2004] "SRW/U and CQL Version 1.1 Specifications Released." - "The SRW Maintenance Agency at the Library of Congress, in conjunction with the SRW Development Group, announces the release of version 1.1 of SRW, the Search/Retrieve Web Service; SRU, Search and Retrieve by URL; and CQL, the Common Query Language. Version 1.1 supercedes Version 1.0, the initial, experimental version, which was released November 2002. Version 1.1 has been in development for more than a year and is the first official version. SRW is an XML-based protocol designed to be a low-barrier-to-entry solution for searching and other information retrieval operations across the internet. It uses existing, well tested, and easily available technologies, such as URI, XML, SOAP, HTTP, and XPath. The design reflects the many years of experience gained developing and using Z39.50; SRW is both robust and easy to understand while retaining many of the important aspects of Z39.50. Web technologies reduce the barriers to new information providers allowing them to make their resources available via a standard search and retrieve service. Building on Z39.50 semantics enables the creation of gateways to existing Z39.50 systems. The protocol may be carried via SOAP or as parameters in a URL. When carried via SOAP, it is referred to as SRW; via URL, as SRU. CQL is a formal language for representing queries to information retrieval systems, including web indexes, bibliographic catalogues, and museum-collections information. Traditionally, query languages are either (on one hand) powerful and expressive but complex and unfriendly — SQL, Xquery — or (on the other hand) simple and intuitive but neither powerful nor expressive, for example, Google. CQL's goal is to combine the simplicity and friendliness of Google searching with the expressive power of Z39.50, supporting queries ranging from very simple to arbitrarily complex expressions..." See details in the news story: "US LOC SRW Maintenance Agency Releases Search/Retrieve Web Service Version 1.1."

• [February 11, 2004] "Invitation to Public Workshops on WS-Notification and WS-Resource Framework." Announcements were posted by William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard) for WS-Notification and WS-Resource Framework Public Review Workshops. February 23-24, 2004. [1] The authors of the recently-published WS-Notification specification are hosting a 1-day workshop on February 24, 2004, starting at 9am and ending at 5pm. This workshop will be hosted by Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino, CA. This is an ad-hoc, open forum for 1) the specification authors to share background information on the design of the specifications and to receive feedback and 2) software vendors and other interested parties to discuss their ideas about the specifications and practicality of implementing these and related Web Services specifications. The agenda for the workshop will include a review of WS-Notification by the authors, relationship to other WS specifications, participant Q&A and feedback, and discussion of next steps and standards plans... We'd like this to be an open meeting and collect a broad range of ideas. If you are interested in participating in the discussions, please reply to this mail by EOD 17 February 2004. Feel free to pass this invitation along to other potential participants, either in your company or elsewhere. The authors of WS -Notification intend to submit an updated version of the Specification to a standards body, in which case they intend to grant a Royalty-Free license to their necessary patent claims. Note that in order to attend, in support of this goal, the attached legal agreement MUST be signed by each attendee..." [2] "The authors of the recently-published WS Resource Framework white papers and specifications (WSRF, Modeling stateful resources with Web services, WS-ResourceProperties, WS-ResourceLifetime) are hosting a 1-day workshop on February 23, 2004, starting at 9am and ending at 5pm. This workshop will be hosted by Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino, CA..." See: (1) Logistics for WS-Resource Framework and WS-Notification Public Review Workshops (HP, Cupertino); (2) the news story "Web Services Notification and Web Services Resource Framework."

• [February 09, 2004] "Compuware Takes Model-Driven Development Mainstream, Releases Compuware OptimalJ 3.1 and Announces Vision for New Paradigm of Enterprise Application Development. Model-Driven Pattern-Based (MDPB) Approach Bridges J2EE Skills Gap. Enables Companies to Increase Productivity of Enterprise Application Development." - "Compuware Corporation today outlined its vision for supporting software developers in successfully building service oriented, enterprise-class applications using the model-driven pattern-based (MDPB) approach. In support of its vision, the Company unveiled version 3.1 of its popular Compuware OptimalJ development platform with industry-leading support for Web Services security, a broader set of options for Compuware OptimalJ's integrated testing environment -- including testing support for BEA WebLogic Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server -- and enhanced features for legacy integration... Compuware OptimalJ 3.1 enables development organizations to do more with less, helping businesses easily migrate to MDPB development through: (1) Pioneering Web Services Security: One of the first development tools to support the new Web Services-Security specification as defined by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) to ensure a secure web services implementation, enabling organizations to conduct business securely via web services. (2) Providing Flexible Modeling: Compuware OptimalJ expands its integration with world-class modeling tools, including IBM Rational Rose, Borland Together Control Center, SparxSystems Enterprise Architect and Objecteering, in addition to providing support for UML modeling. (3) Driving Legacy Modernization: Support is extended for IBM's infrastructure software to integrate with WebSphere MQ so that Compuware OptimalJ customers using the IBM platform can fully leverage their existing infrastructure investments. (4) Ensuring Platform Flexibility: Compuware OptimalJ broadens the options for deployment in the integrated test environment to include leading application servers BEA WebLogic Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server. This enables IT organizations to build, test and debug applications faster..." See also: (1) "OMG Model Driven Architecture (MDA)"; (2) "OASIS Web Services Security TC (WSS) Approves Committee Draft Specifications."

• [February 6, 2004] "Vignette First To Announce Self-Certified JSR 168-Compliant Portal. Vignette Application Portal 7.0 Also Supports Comprehensive Localization and Standards for Universal Access." - "Continuing to deliver on its mission to drive enhanced business efficiency, Vignette Corp. has announced initial availability of Vignette Application Portal 7.0, part of the Vignette V7 family of products. Vignette Application Portal 7.0 has been certified by Vignette on the Sun Microsystem's Test and Compatibility Kit (TCK) for compliance with the recently adopted JSR 168 portlet interoperability standard. With this move, Vignette believes that it has become the first independent software vendor to announce a self-certified JSR 168 portal. The release of Vignette Application Portal 7.0 reaffirms Vignette's leadership in delivering standards-based portal solutions that scale and evolve from department level to enterprisewide deployments. As a founding member of both the Java Community Process's JSR 168 Expert Group and OASIS' WSRP Technical Committee, Vignette has played a pivotal role in helping define JSR 168 and WSRP since their inceptions in January 2002. By driving innovation through the usage of Web services and portal standards, Vignette enables customers to increase efficiency and reduce the complexity and cost of sharing information across organizations by supporting their evolving enterprise portal strategies. 'JSR 168 represents a significant milestone for the industry and will play a key role in advancing an organization's ability to integrate portal deployments and provide a single, consolidated view for end users,' said Craig Roth, vice president, Web and collaboration strategies at Meta Group Inc. 'Organizations should look to vendors that are showing a commitment to industry standards as a means to increase developer productivity and significantly reduce deployment costs.' In conjunction with its support for JSR 168, Vignette will provide plug-ins for the leading integrated development environments (IDE) to provide developers with a seamless experience when deploying IDE-developed JSR 168 portlets within Vignette Application Portal 7.0. In addition, the latest release of Vignette Application Portal provides enhanced localization of portal administrative consoles and multibyte support for compliance with Section 508, enabling disabled administrators to easily manage portal sites, and i18N, allowing diverse administrators in multidialect regions to access a shared portal console that is localized for each individual administrator's dialect..." See also: (1) JSR 168 Portlet API Specification 1.0 Released for Public Review"; (2) "Portlet Open Source Trading (POST) Site for JSR 168 and WSRP Portlets."

• [February 06, 2004] "CECID Completes XML Schema Design and Management Guide." - "The Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID) of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has completed the XML Schema Design and Management Guide for Information and Technology Services Department (ITSD) of the HKSAR Government (HKSARG). The Guide, which aims to provide a process for designing and defining quality, consistent and reusable XML Schema Definitions (XSDs) in a systematic manner, is now available for download at ITSD website... The Hong Kong Observatory, Department of Health and Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau are first to use this Guide in their XML projects of weather news, notifiable infectious disease notification and electronic surveillance system and Integrated Criminal Justice System respectively. Based on international best practices such as UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM), ebXML Core Components (CC), and Universal Business Language (UBL), CECID developed the XML Schema Design & Management Guide for HKSARG to assist bureaux and departments, as well as their business partners, in implementing e-government joined-up service projects (G2G and G2B). When a new joined-up service project is implemented, project teams must conduct a data alignment exercise to agree on the definition and representation of each data element of the information to be exchanged. Further, data conversion or data mapping between the exchanged data may need to be performed. To achieve interoperability for information exchange, XML has been identified by HKSARG as the technical standard. This XML Schema Design and Management Guide will facilitate data interoperability by providing (i) a methodology to specify the definitions and representations of information in a consistent and structured way as reusable information models; (ii) an approach to convert the information models of data elements into XML Schema Definition (XSD) code; and (iii) guidelines to adopt, contribute, and manage XML Schemas to maximize reuse..." See details in the news story "CECID Releases XML Schema Guide Based on UN/CEFACT UMM, ebXML Core Components, and UBL."

• [February 04, 2004] "OASIS Members Collaborate on 'Dataweb' Standard for Exchange of Machine-Readable Information." - "Members of the international standards consortium, OASIS, have organized to create a standard for sharing, linking, and synchronizing data over the Internet and other networks using XML documents and Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs). XRI is a URI-compatible abstract identifier scheme also developed within OASIS. The new OASIS XRI Data Interchange (XDI) Technical Committee will enable implementers to automatically interchange XDI documents and to express controls over the authority, security, privacy, and rights of shared data as XDI links. 'The goal of XDI is to do for controlled data sharing what the Web did for open content sharing,' explained Drummond Reed of Cordance, co-convenor of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee. 'XDI does not displace any specialized XML vocabulary designed to support specific applications or Web services. Rather, it augments them by providing a standard, generalized way to identify, describe, exchange, link, and synchronize other XML documents encoded in any XML language or schema--tying them all into one global 'Dataweb.' 'The formation of this technical committee represents an important step toward a shared vision for a more capable Internet,' added Geoffrey Strongin of AMD, co-convenor of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee. 'XDI will help solve fundamental problems associated with data sharing over the Internet by leveraging and building on the entire array of existing and emerging XML standards.' XDI will address interoperable, automated data interchange across distributed applications and trust domains. Examples of potential applications include: (1) Exchange, linking, and lifetime synchronization of electronic business cards, public keys, and other common identity attributes across distributed directories (dynamic address books); (2) Internet calendar sharing; (3) Trusted search (searches that need to cross multiple private websites); (4) Auto-configuration and intelligent data synchronization across multiple user devices (desktop, laptop, PDA, land phone, cell phone, etc.); (5) Automated website registration, form-fill, and e-commerce transactions; (6) Cross-domain security and privacy management. OASIS XDI Technical Committee members include representatives of AMD, AmSoft Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cordance, Epok, Neustar, NRI, and others..." See details in the news story: "OASIS Members Form XRI Data Interchange (XDI) Technical Committee."

• [January 29, 2004] "Systinet Closes Highly Successful 2003 with Strong Momentum and Growth. Leading Independent Web Services Software Provider Grows its Revenue 5X in 2003, Signs Over 70 Customer Deals and is Poised for Continued Growth in 2004." - Systinet, the leading independent provider of Web services infrastructure software, today announced strong momentum in 2003, positioning itself for continued growth in 2004. Systinet's 2003 revenue was five times greater than its revenue in 2002, which was the result of more than 70 new customer deals. In Q4 2003 alone, Systinet signed 30 new customers, including N2 Broadband, British Telecom, GlaxoSmithKline, The Hartford Financial Group, Mizuho Capital and CoreMedia, adding to its already strong roster of 2003 customer wins that included Amazon, Kodak, BMC Software and Northrop Grumman... New Systinet customers signed in Q4 2003 include: (1) CoreMedia: CoreMedia provides content management, digital rights management and multi-channel delivery technologies, with clients including Bertelsmann, Continental AG, SAP and NEC/Mitsubishi. CoreMedia use Systinet WASP Server for C++ to provide embedded Web services functionality for all its products. 'CoreMedia has integrated Systinet WASP into our Smart Content Technology and our OMA DRM solution for mobile services that is used by leading telecommunication and media companies' explains Soren Stamer, Co-Founder and CEO of CoreMedia. (2) The Hartford Financial Group: One of the largest investment and insurance companies, The Hartford uses Systinet WASP UDDI as a registry to advertise and discover Web services that support a legacy SEMCI (Single Entry Multiple Company Interface) system. WASP UDDI stores all of The Hartford's proprietary XML schema documents and all of the new SOAP services it is building. The Hartford estimates it will save $50,000-$75,000 in internal development costs on a 'per service' basis, using WASP UDDI. The company will recoup its investment in Systinet's product within the first 90 days of usage. (3) N2 Broadband: A leading supplier of scalable, open-standards solutions that enable cable operators to offer on-demand services, N2 Broadband embeds Systinet WASP Server for Java in their OpenStream video-on-demand (VOD) product. WASP is used for back-end data processing and transactions. Systinet's WASP suite of products is a complete solution for building, deploying, securing and managing Web services. Systinet WASP Server for Java and WASP Server for C++ are industrial-strength Web services runtime environments that fully support industry standards, including SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 1.1. WASP UDDI is the only commercially available, fully V2 compliant registry with advanced UDDI V3 functionality..." See also "New Features in WASP 4.7"

• [January 27, 2004] "CambridgeDocs Announces Linux Versions of Its xDoc Server Products for XML Conversion and Publishing. Server Provides End to End Document Transformation and Publishing Services Using XML for Unstructured Content for Linux." - "CambridgeDocs, a leader in the emerging market for XML-based content integration, today announced the Linux versions of its xDoc Content Transformation Server (xCTS). The xDoc Content Transformation Server provides XML-based transformations of documents and content from multiple legacy source formats into XML and then publishing to popular desktop formats, such as Adobe PDF, HTML, and Microsoft Word documents. The xCTS includes the xDoc Conversion Server, which can transform documents from legacy formats, such as PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and WordPerfect into meaningful and well-structured XML. The transformation can retain the 'look and feel,' layout, graphics and content of the source document. On the other side, the xCTS includes the PDF-XML Publishing server, which allows for the transformation of XML. 'The xCTS on LINUX is the first end-to-end transformation tool for unstructured content using XML,' said Rizwan Virk, CambridgeDocs CTO and co-founder. 'While most content conversion tools are written on Windows, the xCTS is fully cross-platform and can be integrated into any J2EE environment. It also allows end to end transformations. You can begin with say, a Microsoft Word File on Linux, convert it to XML, and then publish the XML as a PDF file. Or, you could start with a PDF file, convert it to XML, and then publish it as Microsoft Word document. Furthermore, the newly published content can be aggregated from sections of existing content.' Organizations today have thousands and thousands of legacy documents that need to be made available dynamically to end users both within the organization and outside the organization. Linux is the first of a number of Unix platforms that will be fully supported by CambridgeDocs XML Content Backbone. The xCTS uses the XTE (xDoc Transformation Engine) underneath the hood, a patent-pending technology for transforming unstructured content into meaningful XML. It supports open, XML-based standards for publishing and transformation, including XSLT, and XSL:FO and can also use any XML-schema or DTD as the target or source for transformation, including DocBook XML, 3001 MIL STD, Legal XML, or customer-specific schemas or DTDs. The xCTS works with popular J2EE application servers, such as TomCat, EAServer, as well as with Microsoft IIS based applications. The server can be invoked on Linux using its Servlet API or its Java API..."

• [January 27, 2004] "Parasoft Releases SOAPtest 2.5 for Comprehensive Web Services Testing. Web Services Testing Product Now Offers Security Features, MIME Attachment Support and Enhanced Load Testing Features/" - "Parasoft, leading provider of Automated Error Prevention (AEP) software solutions, announced today the release of SOAPtest 2.5, the most comprehensive Web services testing product available today, verifying every aspect of a Web service from WSDL validation, to client/server unit and functional testing, to performance testing. The latest version of SOAPtest offers support for WS-Security, MIME attachments, enhanced load testing features, and other features designed to help development teams prevent errors and accelerate time to market for their Web service initiatives. 'As Web services mature and more companies adopt them, they need comprehensive tools to address key issues such as interoperability, security, change management and scalability,' said Gary Brunell, Parasoft Vice President of Professional Services. 'SOAPtest 2.5 offers the functionality to address all of these issues while improving the software lifecycle by preventing errors early in the development process.' PPQ#What's New in SOAPtest 2.5#PPQ (1) WS-Security support including fully configurable SOAP Headers and support for X509, SAML, username security tokens, XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption. (2) MIME Attachment support including meeting SOAP with Attachments and OASIS ebXML specifications and sending and receiving both text/XML and binary attachments. (3) Enhanced load testing features including SNMP and Windows monitors, customizable HTML reports and detailed report histograms. (4) WS-I Analyzer Tool to verify WSDL and SOAP traffic for conformance, includes WS-I Testing Tool 1.0 and produces WS-I conformance reports. (5) Supports JMS and Asynchronous testing..." See also "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."

• [January 26, 2004] "Denmark Becomes First Country to Adopt OASIS Universal Business Language." - "The Danish National XML Committee announced today that it has formally adopted an early version of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) as a standard for e-Commerce in the public sector. Following a 30-day public hearing, the Danish XML Committee decided to use UBL 0.7 to enable integration between systems controlled by state authorities and a newly implemented portal for public procurement. UBL provides an XML library of common business data components together with a set of standard business documents such as purchase orders and invoices that are assembled from the component library. UBL is the product of an international technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a non-profit consortium dedicated to the creation of XML standards. Currently at version 1.0 Beta, UBL is produced in an open, publicly visible process and is made available without royalties or other fees. The Public Procurement Portal is an electronic market place to which both private and public purchasers and their suppliers have access, and whose functionality, interface, security and transaction costs are regulated by the public sector. It is the first public procurement portal in Europe. The establishment of the Public Procurement Portal is an important part of the strategy to make procurement efficient and is implemented on the basis of the wish to create a common infrastructure for the trade between the public units and the suppliers. With a public sector procurement of goods and services for approximately DKK 100 billion per year, even modest improvements in efficiency will be of great value for Danish society. By virtue of the public sector's purchasing volume, increased use of e-commerce will furthermore contribute to the penetration of e-commerce in Denmark in general. The suppliers will get accustomed to e-commerce and an infrastructure will be established. Particularly favourable arrangements have been made to secure access by small suppliers. 'A royalty free standard with strong and broad vendor support is a key enabler for the development of both e-Business and e-Government. We are pleased to be a part of the OASIS UBL initiative,' said Michael Bang Kjeldgaard of the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency, chair of the Danish XML Committee. 'We have learned valuable lessons from the work being carried out in the OASIS UBL Technical Committee. Not only does UBL deliver a royalty free standard for electronic commerce, but the 'Naming and Design Rules,' that dictate how UBL is expressed in XML Schema, have inspired us in the development of other XML vocabularies'..." General references in "Universal Business Language (UBL)."

• [January 26, 2004] "The OASIS Symposium on Reliable Infrastructures for XML OASIS Annual General Meeting and Technical Committee Meetings to Follow April 26 - 29, 2004 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA." - "OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, invites you to submit a proposal for a presentation, panel discussion or tutorial for the OASIS Symposium on Reliable Infrastructures for XML, including web services architectures. The goals of the symposium are to: (1) Provide a forum for OASIS Technical Committee members to exchange ideas and present results of ongoing work, works-in-progress, etc.; (2) Identify areas where coordination between standards efforts is needed to promote interoperability; (3) Identify unaddressed topics where standards development is needed; (4) Enable outside experts to present issues / opportunities to OASIS members... The symposium will be followed immediately with two days (April 28-29, 2004) reserved for OASIS Technical Committees, Joint Committees and Member Sections to use for face-to-face working sessions. Conference rooms will be available to TC's to use for their meetings based on the number of rooms booked at the designated hotel; space is limited. The OASIS Annual General Meeting will also be held in conjunction with the symposium. The OASIS Symposium will be held on Monday, April 26th and Tuesday, April 27th at the Marriott in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. The symposium registration fee for OASIS members is 265 USD. The OASIS Annual General Meeting will be held Tuesday evening. All OASIS members are invited to attend... Many different (and partially interchangeable) technologies are proposed or available to increase the reliability of XML-based messaging and networking infrastructure. These include technologies applied: at the transport layer (e.g., reliable messaging specifications); at the application layer (e.g., transaction protocols); at intermediate levels (e.g., routing, point-to-point compared to end-to-end); by using Message-Oriented Middleware as a carrier for XML messages. We define "reliable" to mean that implementing one or more of these technologies in an infrastructure removes some of the burden of ensuring application integrity from software programmers and architects. The OASIS Symposium is focused on exploring the current state of these technologies and exploring areas where open standards are needed..."

• [January 22, 2004] "OFX Consortium Releases OFX 2.0.2 XML Schema. Building OFX Clients and Servers Now Easier and More Cost-Effective Than Ever." - "The Open Financial Exchange Consortium today announced the public availability of the OFX 2.0.2 XML Schema. This release enables financial institutions and their technology providers to build state-of-the-art OFX systems faster and more cost-effectively using the many off-the-shelf XML development systems that are currently available. The new OFX 2.0.2 XML Schema is compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Schema Recommendation, 2 May 2001. It complements the existing OFX 2.0.2 specification and DTD (Document Type Definition) to enable software developers to utilize the latest in XML technology. Additionally, the new OFX XML Schema provides a clear expansion path to allow OFX to support other important XML technologies such as SOAP and WSDL. It also expands OFX to support account aggregation in a manner that conforms to the latest BITS Phase II Aggregation guidelines. 'OFX is fast becoming the industry standard and the preferred method of downloading data by Quicken and QuickBooks customers,' said Gil Clark, OFX program manager, Intuit. 'Because it enables an easier, faster and more accurate download experience for our customers, Intuit is focusing all future development of online banking solutions on OFX. The new schema serves users who are upgrading their systems to new XML technology as well as those who are using OFX for new functionality such as account aggregation equally well.' 'Microsoft is committed to simplifying connectivity for financial institutions that want to make it easier for their customers to access their account information electronically,' said Greg Martin, financial products connectivity evangelist at Microsoft Corp. 'The OFX XML schema enables financial institutions to utilize existing XML systems to easily and quickly implement cost-effective OFX solutions.' As well as enabling financial institutions to connect to their customers, OFX can support connectivity within the systems of the financial institutions themselves. The OFX XML schema allows intra-enterprise-oriented tools to be developed using the latest XML technology that, while dedicated to internal purposes, also adheres to a recognized industry standard. This helps assure interoperability with other internal and external systems. 'The XML schema definition for OFX 2.0.2 will allow financial institutions and vendors the opportunity to leverage modern development tools to develop solutions that use OFX. Citigroup was pleased to participate in this effort to produce a XML schema for OFX, and supports and encourages the use of open standards,' said Michael Grandcolas, chief architect, Citibanking Technology Solutions Group. The OFX 2.0.2 XML Schema was developed by the OFX Web services working group chaired by Business Logic. Other key contributors were Intuit, Microsoft and Citigroup..." General references in "Open Financial Exchange (OFX)."

• [January 20, 2004] "OGC Members Adopt Implementation Specification for Location Based Services." - "At meetings held at United Nations Headquarters, OGC members approved the OpenGIS Location Services (OpenLS) Specification for public release... The OpenLS Implementation Specification defines a set of core interfaces for implementing interoperable location service applications. The core interfaces are for accessing directory services (such as yellow pages), route determination, location determination gateway, geocoding, reverse geocoding, and portrayal services using standard Web protocols. The interfaces allow telecommunications companies, telematics service providers, traditional GIS technology companies, and location-based services (LBS) providers to efficiently implement interoperable LBS applications that seamlessly access multiple content repositories and service frameworks that work across the world's many different wireless networks and devices. The following organizations submitted the OpenGIS OpenLS Implementation Specification for formal adoption: Autodesk, ESRI, Image Matters, Intergraph IntelliWhere, MapInfo, and Webraska. The submitters acknowledge the following OGC member organizations for their in-kind contributions: Hutchison 3G, IONIC Software sa, Navigation Technologies, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. The OpenLS Specification grew from work performed in OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program that rapidly delivers proven candidate specifications into OGC's Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release. In OGC's Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geoprocessing interoperability problems posed by the Initiative's sponsoring organizations... OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 255 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications..." General references in "Geography Markup Language (GML)".

• [January 15, 2004] "Global eXchange Services to Acquire Product Information Management Leader HAHT Commerce. Acquisition Creates 'One-Stop Shop' for Comprehensive Data Synchronization Solutions." - "Global eXchange Services, Inc., the B2B e-commerce software, services and solutions pioneer, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire HAHT Commerce, an award-winning provider of demand chain management applications. Under terms of the agreement, Global eXchange Services will acquire all the capital stock of HAHT Commerce through a merger for approximately $30 million in a combination of cash and shares of GXS Holdings. GXS Holdings is the parent company of Global eXchange Services, Inc. The transaction is subject to the approval of HAHT Commerce's shareholders and other conditions. Global eXchange Services expects the acquisition to be completed in February 2004. The acquisition will bring together two providers of complementary B2B e-commerce solutions that help retailers, manufacturers and suppliers of all sizes to increase revenues, reduce costs, expand collaboration and expedite time-to-market for new products. The addition of HAHT Commerce will enable Global eXchange Services to provide businesses of all sizes with the industry's most comprehensive solution for product information management (PIM) and data synchronization -- enabling retailers, manufacturers and suppliers to manage product information from concept to consumer. With this acquisition, Global eXchange Services will be able to deliver a complete solution suite that includes software to integrate data into and out of back-end systems, management tools to publish and syndicate product information accurately, transaction delivery services to move the information, and community enablement to electronically connect all trading partners in the global retail supply chain... Global eXchange Services will rapidly integrate the following key components in its end-to-end data synchronization solution: (1) Feature-Rich Product Information Management - The Product Information Management (PIM) solution of the HAHT Commerce Suite features a powerful UCCnet-interoperable catalog capable of aggregating, organizing, structuring and managing item-related content. The PIM can aggregate data from multiple internal sources including leading ERP systems, create a scalable data repository (catalog) for centralized management, and optimize data flow to multiple destinations. (2) Simple Syndication with UCCNet - HAHT Commerce's Quick Connect Package is a fast and cost-effective entry point for suppliers and manufacturers seeking to leverage a machine-to-machine XML interface to synchronize items with retail partners through the UCCnet foundation service. (3) Hosted Catalog Services and Data Pools - The Global eXchange Services Global Product Catalogue provides a multi-community, multi-industry data repository of more than 65 million line items, comprehensive trading partner profiles and synchronization services supporting over 17,000 trading partners. (4) Rapid, Worldwide Community Enablement - From EDI to AS2 and XML formats, Global eXchange Services can on-board businesses to quickly and easily exchange product information electronically in more than 36 countries with multi-language support..." See also "Uniform Code Council (UCC) XML Program."

• [January 14, 2004] "NISO-Sponsored INFO URI Scheme is Information Gateway to the Web. Publishing and Library Communities Join Forces to Facilitate and Expedite Representation of Standard Identifiers such as Library of Congress Control Numbers on the Web." - "Working under the auspices of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a joint task force of the publishing and library communities has developed and published a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme aimed at the identification of information assets. Information assets should be interpreted rather broadly to include, for example, documents and terms from classification schemes. The INFO URI scheme is a consistent and reliable way to represent and reference such standard identifiers as Dewey Decimal Classifications on the Web so that these identifiers can be 'read' and understood by Web applications. Led by four NISO members and associates -- Los Alamos National Laboratory, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), Elsevier, and Manifest Solutions -- the initiative builds on earlier consultations with representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)... Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research & Prototyping at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Research Library, stated, 'A good example of the problem that the INFO URI scheme solves involves PubMed identifiers: unique numbers assigned to records in the PubMed database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine. PubMed identifiers originated prior to the Web, so they are not URIs. As such they do not exist naturally in the Web infrastructure because the Web only recognizes URIs as a means to identify information resources. So Web applications cannot use PubMed identifiers, and hence cannot reference PubMed records that are identified by them. The solution is to turn PubMed identifiers into URIs. The INFO Registry enables the registration of public namespaces of standard identifiers; NCBI registered its PubMed identifier namespace under the INFO Registry-their namespace is pmid-so we can now talk about the record with the PubMed identifier '12376099' in URI terms as <info:pmid/12376099>.' 'The goal of INFO is to act as a bridging mechanism to the Web by providing a lightweight means for registering public namespaces used for the identification of information assets,' said Tony Hammond, Advanced Technology Group at Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. 'We see INFO as an enabling technology for the library, publishing and media communities-a way to facilitate and speed the growth of the Web as a truly global information place beyond a basic document repository. The Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and NASA are among those organizations that have already registered public namespaces with the INFO Registry.' 'There are different ways to represent these identifiers on the Web,' explained Pat Harris, NISO's Executive Director, 'but the INFO URI scheme really simplifies matters. As a Web user, you aren't likely to see the scheme in action on your screen-for example, <info:lccn/2002022641>, because it's an under-the-hood way of communicating the identity of an information asset to a Web application'..."

• [January 13, 2004] "VeriSign Selected to Operate Root Directory for EPCglobal Network. Highly Scalable, Secure and Global Network Directory Service Will Enhance the Application of EPC Technologies in the Supply Chain." - "VeriSign, Inc., the leading provider of critical infrastructure services for the Internet and telecommunications networks, announced today it has been selected by EPCglobal, a not-for-profit standards organization, to operate the Object Naming Service or ONS as the root directory for the EPCglobal Network. The EPCglobal Network is a system that leverages the existing Internet infrastructure to create a low-cost, standards-based set of services for trading partners to use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and the electronic product code (EPC) to capture and share information on items throughout the supply chain. When the EPC is linked to the directory it becomes a tool that enables new ways of doing business. The EPC is a unique number that can be assigned to individual items in cases and pallets within the supply chain for identification and tracking. Similar to today's bar code, these 'license plates' for products are embedded in EPC tags, which can transmit EPC information to special readers placed in dock doors and other locations. This makes it easier to track products as they move through the supply chain. Through the use of the EPCglobal Network, businesses can become more efficient and productive in logistics, inventory management and product placement. To support this new model for supply chain management thousands of enterprises need to be able to securely access, in real-time, potentially billions of unique EPCs from a highly available global ONS directory..." See: (1) "Physical Markup Language (PML) for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)"; (2) "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Resources and Readings."

• [January 12, 2003] "METRO Group to Introduce RFID Across the Company. First Use of RFID Technology Along The Entire Process Chain. Comprehensive Pilot Project to Kick Off With 100 Suppliers, 10 Central Warehouses and Approximately 250 Stores." - "METRO Group, the world's fifth-largest retailing company, will begin using RFID technology (Radio Frequency Identification) throughout its entire process chain. Beginning in November 2004, approximately 100 suppliers initially will affix RFID tags to their pallets and transport packages for delivery to ten central warehouses and around 250 stores within the METRO Group's sales divisions Metro Cash & Carry, Real hypermarkets, Extra supermarkets and Galeria Kaufhof department stores. Tests with the new RFID tags have been successfully conducted over recent months at the METRO Group's Extra Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany, the first project of the METRO Group Future Store Initiative. In Rheinberg, the Initiative tests the use and interaction of a number of new retailing technologies under real-life conditions, with the objective to develop benefit-driven solutions -- both for customers and retailers. To achieve this, RFID technology is of particular importance, as it enables non-contact transmission of product information such as price, manufacturer, expiration date and a product's weight via radio frequency... Thus far, the Initiative is only testing RFID in certain areas of the process chain, primarily in warehouse management. RFID technology enables the automatic inspection of incoming goods: Delivery of goods to the Future Store in Rheinberg are fitted with RFID tags in the central warehouse and read in upon arrival at the store. During transport from the store's warehouse to the salesroom, goods are read in again, and identified as 'moved to the frontstore.' The tests in Rheinberg have shown that RFID offers retailers and their customers enormous advantages: more effective processes and consequently lower costs, which benefits both parties. Using RFID, goods will be able to be located along the entire process chain -- from production all the way through to the shelf in the store. Managing orders can be optimized, losses reduced and out-of-stock situations avoided, assuring an even more consistent availability of goods for the customer. Utilization of RFID for the first time along the entire process chain is the most sweeping project thus far for the METRO Group Future Store Initiative. It is a multi-stage plan beginning November 2004 that provides for approximately 100 of Metro's suppliers to already outfit all pallets and transport packages with RFID tags in their production facilities for goods bound for ten of the METRO Group's central warehouses. The goods' path from manufacturer to METRO Group's warehouses will thus be recorded using RFID technology. 100 stores from the Real and Extra sales divisions, 122 Galeria Kaufhof department stores, and 59 Metro Cash & Carry wholesale stores in Germany will be receiving RFID-tagged deliveries from these warehouses. To assure a smooth implementation of the project, METRO Group sets up a lab for the suppliers involved. In this lab, the functionality of the RFID technology, e.g. the reading of tags, is being tested..." See: (1) "Physical Markup Language (PML) for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)"; (2) "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Resources and Readings."

Earlier Announcements 2003 Q4

• [December 31, 2003] "W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee to be Knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Web Inventor Recognized for Contributions to Internet Development." - "Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will be made a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth. This was announced earlier today by Buckingham Palace as part of the 2004 New Year's Honours list. The rank of Knight Commander is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire, one of the Orders of Chivalry awarded. Berners-Lee, 48, a British citizen who lives in the United States, is being knighted in recognition of his 'services to the global development of the Internet' through the invention of the World Wide Web. 'This is an honor which applies to the whole Web development community, and to the inventors and developers of the Internet, whose work made the Web possible, ' stated Berners-Lee. 'I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the Web; of building it in a decentralized way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees.' 'By recognizing the Web in such a significant way, it also makes clear the responsibility its creators and users share,' he continued. 'Information technology changes the world, and as a result, its practitioners cannot be disconnected from its technical and societal impacts. Rather, we share a responsibility to make this work for the common good, and to take into account the diverse populations it serves.' Born in London, Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England in 1976. While there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. In 1980, while Berners-Lee worked as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information using the kind of random associations the brain makes. The 'Enquire' program -- which was never published -- formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the Web. While at CERN in 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier 'Enquire' work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a Web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, 'httpd', and the first client, 'World Wide Web,' in October 1990. He also wrote the first version of the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links, known as HTML..."

• [December 28, 2003] "Perens To Highlight Legal, Technical Curbs on Information Exchange in NISO Keynote. Annual Meeting Free and Open to All. Other Events Include ISBN and NISO Standards Briefings." - "With a focus on the potential threats to the future of libraries, Open Source leader Bruce Perens will address the National Information Standards Organization's (NISO) Annual Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the midwinter meeting of the American Library Association. The international meeting -- free and open to the public -- on Sunday, January 11, 2004 at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego will include participants from technology vendors and software developers, publishing companies, content aggregators, universities, government, and libraries. Citing the value of an Open-Source approach to information standards and distribution, Perens will explore the places where intellectual property law can impinge on the operation of libraries. 'We now have the technological means to control the copyright of material in ways we never had before,' he noted. 'I will cover specific efforts to curb the distribution of information by libraries or otherwise restrict it' in the speech entitled 'A World of Constraint.' Among those efforts are HR 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriate Act; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); and software patenting. 'The big question for libraries,' Perens continued, 'is "will it be considered legal to be a lending repository of knowledge?"' Perens (www.perens.com) is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source community. He is creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software. He is founder or co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, The Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, and No-Code International... On January 12, 2004 NISO will continue its programming with 'An ISBN Briefing: Size Matters!' The program in Room 2 of the San Diego Convention Center will tell participants how to transition to the new 13-digit International Standard Book Number (ISBN) from the current 10-digit format... On January 9, 2004 NISO will hold a joint meeting with the Automation Vendor Information Advisory Committee (AVIAC) at the San Diego Convention Center, Room 17A/B. The meeting will focus on the new NISO Networked Reference Protocol and the trial implementations to be launched in the first quarter 2004. Participants will explore how this new standard can be the cornerstone of expanding a company's services... On January 10, NISO will conduct a standards briefing for the Library & Information Technology Association (LITA) Standards Special Interest Group. To be held at the Courtyard by Marriott Bankers Room, the meeting will explore the new Statistics and Metrics Standard, the OpenURL, and the Metasearch Initiative, among other projects... NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation..."

• [December 15, 2003] "BEA Systems Delivers New Innovations, Standards Contributions to Help Developers Reduce Coding Complexity for Dramatically Increased Productivity. New Portability Kit, Open Source Project and Web Site Further Drive Investment Protection and Faster Time to Value for Customers." - "As part of its ongoing effort to reduce computing complexity, BEA Systems, Inc., the world's leading application infrastructure software company, today announced new resources, including a Page Flow Portability Kit, XML Beans as an Apache Project and a BEA standards portal, all designed to help developers realize increased productivity and to help customers realize faster time to value. By delivering these innovations to the standards community, BEA continues its commitment to creating customer-driven innovations which can help ensure interoperability and therefore customers' long-term IT investment. Today's news -- Page Flow Portability Kit, XML Beans as an Apache Project and a BEA standards portal -- was issued in response to customers' and developers' demand for easier application development and increased flexibility. BEA has traditionally provided these offerings by delivering both the first and the best implementations of new standards, helping to allow customers to experience exceptional reuse and portability of their applications. As an example, BEA created XML Beans to make XML and Java easier to use together. More recently, customers requested portability kits and open source initiatives and again, BEA has responded to help ensure application portability and interoperability... The BEA WebLogic Workshop Java Page Flow innovation is designed to make it easier for developers to build enterprise-class Web applications on BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1. The new Page Flow Portability Kit is designed to give customers the flexibility to deploy their page flows to the J2EE platform of their choice. Page Flows can provide a software engineering framework that is designed to allow developers to separate user interface code from navigational control and other business logic, and to track application status. WebLogic Workshop's Page Flows are based on Struts 1.1, a popular framework embraced by many developers for building large, enterprise-scale Web sites. Struts 1.1 is powerful, but difficult to use due to the vast amount of files and configurations developers must learn and manage. Workshop's Page Flows can offer significant advantages, including the automatic generation and synchronization of XML configuration files, plus a sophisticated graphical IDE to define, build, deploy and maintain the Web application... Launched earlier this year, XML Beans is an innovative technology that is designed to help Java developers more easily manage XML documents. XML Beans can provide Java object interfaces while preserving full access to the underlying XML messages, helping ensure true loose-coupling between applications for greater application reliability and scalability. By BEA submitting XML Beans as an Apache Project, developers can be assured that the technology will drive interoperability by supporting the broadest spectrum of XML and schema types..."

• [December 10, 2003] "OASIS Interoperability Demos Showcase ebXML, SAML, UBL, WS-Reliability, and XACML at XML 2003. Adobe, BEA, Citrix, Cyclone Commerce, Drake Certivo, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Korean National Computerization Agency (NCA), NEC, US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Vignette, and Others Demonstrate Interoperability of Standards." - "Companies, users, and government agencies from around the world collaborated on four separate interoperability demonstrations of OASIS Standards and specifications at the XML 2003 conference this week. In scenarios as varied as epidemic management, weather portal aggregation, supply chain operations, and messaging, the practical usage of OASIS Standards was shown. 'These demonstrations provide more evidence that e-business, security and Web services standards are being deployed to solve real-world challenges,' said James Bryce Clark, OASIS Manager for Technical Services Development. 'The excitment here is not limited to what is being demonstrated. The types of participants -- vendors and end users, large and small, government agenies--as well as the geographic span they represent clearly indicates buy-in from all stake-holders.' Demos: (1) Achieving Interoperability Using Test Frameworks: Drake Certivo, NCA, and NIST implemented a real-world ebXML test scenario involving a supply chain in which a buyer tests an upgrade with their solutions as well as with their customers' solutions. The enhancements were then integrated into production operations. The demo also provided access to services via an ebXML Registry which supported the supply chain operations. (2) OASIS WS-Reliability Interoperability Demonstration: Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems demonstrated their independently developed implementations of the OASIS WS-Reliability specification. WS-Reliability is intended for use in mission critical applications that require guaranteed delivery, duplicate message elimination, and/or message ordering within a transaction. These three fundamental properties of the WS-Reliability specification were demonstrated utilizing a use case derived from a commercial scenario. (3) Epidemic Management Using OASIS ebXML, UBL and XACML: Adobe, Cyclone Commerce, NIST, Sun Microsytems, and others demonstrated an end-to-end data transmission process using OASIS Standards for ebXML Registry, ebXML Messaging, ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement (CPP/A), ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Universal Business Language (UBL), and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). In the demo, a public health care entity for disease control, uses a registry to manage epidemiological data. Laboratories, emergency rooms, and airports send periodic reports on persons that may be carrying communicable diseases to the registry. (4) Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP): BEA, Citrix, IBM, Oracle, and Vignette showcased a common use case for WSRP in which a weather site was configured as a portal. Pages on the site were aggregated by the portal and all of the application components used to produce the forecasts and other data were implemented as portlets. These portlets were then reused on other portals via WSRP rather than requiring the portals to separately install the complete set of portlets. WSRP was shown to maximize both control and availability for the weather site while minimizing costs for the remote portal sites..."

• [December 10, 2003] "WS-I Delivers Sample Applications for Basic Profile. Sample Applications Provide Real-World Business Requirements to Web Services." - "The Web Services Interoperability Organization ('WS-I') today announced the general availability of the WS-I Sample Application 1.0. This important deliverable consists of the WS-I Supply Chain Management Use Cases 1.0, the WS-I Usage Scenarios 1.0, the WS-I Supply Chain Management Technical Architecture 1.0 and Sample Application 1.0 implementations developed by 10 vendor companies. These documents and implementations model a simplified supply chain management scenario and demonstrate the features in the recently released WS-I Basic Profile 1.0. The availability of this material was announced today at the XML Conference & Exposition 2003 taking place this week in Philadelphia. 'The availability of the WS-I Sample Application 1.0 deliverables help define best practices for using the Basic Profile 1.0, and provide the real-world implementation guidance and support necessary for customers deploying Web services,' said Sinisa Zimek, chairman of the Sample Applications Working Group. 'We believe that the WS-I Sample Application 1.0 is an important catalyst in the WS-I effort to create industry-level Web services profiles and tools.' The WS-I Sample Application 1.0 provides a configurable collection of Web services, which exercise the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 using a supply chain scenario that models the interactions between multiple retail storefronts, warehouses and manufacturers. Implementations of the Sample Application have been delivered by BEA Systems, Bowstreet, Corillian, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Quovadx, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. WS-I will be demonstrating these implementations at an interoperability showcase this week at the XML Conference & Exposition 2003. The Sample Application Technical Architecture 1.0 details a common design and implementation of the supply chain management application. One of the goals of the WS-I Sample Application 1.0 is to exploit as many of the aspects of the Basic Profile 1.0 as possible. To this end, the Sample Application Technical Architecture implements several schema-naming conventions, SOAP message formats, SOAP message styles, and WSDL design practices that all conform to the Basic Profile..." See: (1) Supply Chain Sample Applications; (2) general references in "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."

• [December 10, 2003] "IDEAlliance Issues ICE 2.0 RFC at Industry News Standards Summit. Industry Strength, Web-Services Compliant Syndication Protocol Nears Final Approval." - "IDEAlliance, a leading trade association dedicated to fostering information technology standards, highlighted the new ICE 2.0 Specification and issued a Request for Comment at the News Standards Summit held in conjunction with the XML 2003 Conference and Exposition. XML 2003 is being held Dec. 7-12, 2003 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The News Standards Summit, co-sponsored by IDEAlliance, IFRA (INCA-FIEJ Research Association), IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council), NAA (Newspaper Association of America), and OASIS, brought together 75 major players in the news industry -- experts on news metadata standards, as well as commercial news providers and aggregators, to analyze the current state of (and future expectations for) XML-enabled news publishing efforts from both the content and processing-model perspectives. The ICE specification, originally developed in 1998 by a community of 80 content providers and software venders, provides businesses with an XML-based common language and architecture that facilitates automatic delivery, updating and managing content assets in a trusted fashion without manual packaging or knowledge of remote Web-site structures. With the development of this major revision to the ICE Specification, robust content syndication is supported in a Web Services environment for the first time. According to Dr. Richard Martin, Chairman of the ICE2 Specification Development Committee, 'For Version 2.0 of the ICE protocol, it was critical to consider integration of Web Services related standards for the ICE2 definition. Given that ICE content syndication and the Web Services standards are squarely focused on distributed computing space, the synergy between the two sets of standards should be exploited to make ICE2 more complete and easier to adopt.' Dianne Kennedy, Vice President of Publishing Technologies for IDEAlliance and Editor of the ICE 2.0 Specification, commented, 'Unlike RSS and other light-weight syndication protocols, ICE 2.0 is designed to support industrial-strength content syndication. It provides for subscription management, verification of delivery, and scheduled delivery in both push and pull modes. ICE is the protocol for syndicators who are distributing 'valued content' that generates a revenue stream or requires guaranteed delivery in a secure environment.' Development of the ICE2 specification is an open industry activity, and user participation is welcomed. The ICE Authoring Group is now seeking comments from organizations that have interest in putting the proposed ICE2 specification to use..." See: (1) "XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence"; (2) "Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Protocol."

• [December 10, 2003] "XML Cup 2003 Awards Presented to Michael Sperberg-McQueen of W3C, Adam Bosworth of BEA. Annual Awards Honor Achievements, Contributions to XML Standard." - "IDEAlliance, a leading trade association dedicated to fostering information technology standards, today presented the XML Cup 2003 for contributions to XML to Michael Sperberg-McQueen of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Adam Bosworth of BEA Systems, Inc. The Cup was presented during the Wednesday Keynote Session of the XML Conference and Exposition 2003. 'Adam Bosworth and Michael Sperberg-McQueen have both been instrumental in making XML successful,' said Lauren Wood, Chair of the XML 2003 Conference, who awarded the Cup. 'They persuaded different communities to use XML, have thought deeply about potential problems and how to solve them, and have been an inspiration for many people. We're honored that both Michael and Adam are speaking at XML 2003 and congratulate them on being awarded the Cup.' 'Within the XML community, it is generally acknowledged that XML as we know it today would not exist without Michael and Adam's efforts,' said Marion L. Elledge, Vice President of Information Technology Alliances and Conferences, IDEAlliance. 'The XML Cup Awards were created to honor our industry's true visionaries and pioneers, and these two gentlemen certainly qualify.' Michael Sperberg-McQueen is the Architecture Domain Leader for the World Wide Web Consortium, an international member organization responsible for developing interoperable Web technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools). He co-edited the XML 1.0 specification and the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative; he also co-chairs the W3C XML Coordination Group and the W3C XML Schema Working Group. 'Michael's depth of knowledge and passion has played a key role in the creation of XML as we know it,' declared Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and W3C Director. 'Drawing on the experiences in both the Text Encoding Initiative and his foundation work on XML 1.0, Michael has contributed greatly to structured data evolution on the Web, for which W3C and I are most grateful. I'm pleased to see that the XML 2003 Planning Committee shares our sentiments and chose to award him the XML Cup.' Adam Bosworth is Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Advanced Development at BEA Systems, driving the strategic and technical direction for the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform. Before joining BEA, Bosworth co-founded Crossgain, a software development firm acquired by BEA in 2001. Prior to starting Crossgain, he was a senior manager at Microsoft, where he drove the company's XML program from 1997 through 1999. He was then named General Manager of Microsoft's WebData organization, a team focused on refining the company's long-term XML strategy. 'Our industry is undergoing constant innovation, and it has been a thrill to be on the frontlines. I'm honored to have been chosen amongst this group of experts as the recipient of the 2003 XML Cup. IDEAlliance's XML Conference showcases the advancement of XML technology, and is an impressive gathering of visionaries,' said Adam Bosworth, BEA Systems chief architect and senior vice president of advanced development..." See also: (1) "XML Cup Award 2002 Presented to Jon Bosak and Tim Bray. Industry Leaders Recognized for Their Achievements and Work on the XML Standard."; (2) "First XML Cup Award Presented to Industry Pioneer James Clark. Recognized for Achievements and Work on the XML Standard."

• [December 10, 2003] OMG Announces Workshop on Deploying Service Oriented Architectures." - "The Object Management Group (OMG) announces a call for proposals for the its new workshop on Deploying Service Oriented Architectures taking place February 23 -26, 2004 in San Jose, CA, USA... A service is a function that is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services. A Service-Oriented Architecture is essentially a collection of services communicating with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services collaborating to perform some activity. Communication can be between internal or external systems. The notion of "Service-Oriented Architecture" is not new. Middleware solutions such as Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on OMG's CORBA specification and Microsoft's DCOM existed well before the term was coined. What is new is the technology addition of loosely-coupled web services employing XML over the internet as a means of communications between services. Various standards organizations like the OMG and the W3C have taken the lead on standardization of various aspects of technologies related to this broad area. For instance, with its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to specifying a system independently of the platform that supports it, the OMG is promoting the development of architectures and standardized mappings to specify and implement enterprise applications built to Service-Oriented Architectures that can be deployed on a variety of execution platforms including CORBA and J2EE. Hosted by the OMG, this summit will explore how Service-Oriented Architectures can be best designed and deployed to produce the most useful enterprise solutions. The Workshop will also address how related modeling, architectures and standards are and can be used in Service-Oriented Architectures within individual enterprises. The Workshop is open to all with an interest in, and understanding of the topic of Service-Oriented Architectures. Workshop participants will include representatives of standards bodies, implementers (architects, modelers, developers, systems integrators), large end-user organizations, and technology providers. Practitioners with relevant experience are invited to come and share their experiences with each other and their vendor community. The four-day program will consist of tutorials followed by sessions and open panel discussions that describe case studies and technology issues and choices for enterprise applications that were designed using industry standards and specifications..." [source CFP]

• [December 09, 2003] "IPTC Joins in XML News Standards Summit. IPTC Roadmap 2005 for NewsML, NITF and SportsML." - "XML-based formats for sharing news are rapidly gaining acceptance and may soon revolutionise the way news is shared between agencies and is presented to the public, a software developer's group was told today. But traditional newspaper publishers are still moving cautiously. 'Customers prefer extremely simple solutions,' said Geoff Haynes, manager of product development for The Associated Press. More than 100 news organisations, news system vendors and XML developers gathered here for The News Standards Summit, an all-day session where progress reports were delivered by developers and users who share XML as their lingua franca. As a major force in news standards for nearly 40 years, IPTC presented its latest versions of NewsML, NITF and SportsML -- standards that are already in use by major news agencies around the world. 'The wide interest and participation in the News Summit proves that there is an industry-wide need to develop the business cases for the required for management support and implement the existing standards for news,' said John Iobst, chairman of the IPTC. With several text-based systems for tagging news content and important data about the news, IPTC is provides a framework for moving news stories from creation through editing and onward to publishing. For magazines and web discussion 'blogs', several XML standards group presented plans for publishing and syndication. The IPTC described its own plans -- called IPTC Roadmap 2005 -- to update NewsML and revamp the method for proposing, designing and maintaining its XML standards. 'The IPTC Roadmap 2005 has as its primary goals to make standards easier to implement and to improve documentation and education on standards. This is driven by requirements from our users, and shows that IPTC is already aligning with wide user demand,' said Michael Steidl, IPTC's Managing director. 'This makes us work harder on these aims.' The News Standards Summit was held in partnership with the XML 2003 Conference of IDEAlliance and OASIS. The IPTC's next regular meeting will be in Athens in March 2004. The IPTC, based in Windsor, England, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world..." See: (1) "XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence"; (2) "NewsML"; (3) "SportsML"; (4) "News Industry Text Format (NITF)."

• [December 09, 2003] "Software AG Increases XML Support Within Its Natural Development Environment for Windows, UNIX and Linux Platforms. Natural version 6 Enables Developers to Access XML Documents Stored in the Company's Tamino XML Server Without Learning an XML-Specific Query Language." - "Software AG, Inc., a pioneer in XML solutions, today announced the availability of Natural version 6 for Windows, UNIX and Linux platforms. Software AG's popular 4GL development environment, which is currently installed at approximately 3,000 organizations worldwide, now enables Natural programmers to access XML documents stored in the company's Tamino XML Server without needing to learn an XML-specific query language. Natural version 6 also allows developers working in Windows to access Natural programs running in UNIX or on a mainframe -- a capability the company calls Single-Point-of-Development. Both capabilities are designed to increase the speed and convenience of using Natural in an open systems environment. The announcement was made at the 2003 XML Conference and Exposition. Thanks to an expanded XML tool kit and new language constructs, users of Natural version 6 can process XML documents with greater ease and flexibility. For example, developers can gain access to Software AG's Tamino XML Server using familiar Natural DML (Data Manipulation Language) statements, meaning that XML documents residing in Tamino can be queried from Natural without the developer having to learn XPath, XQuery or a similar XML-specific protocol. In addition, Websites and HTML pages can now be designed more easily and efficiently in Natural version 6 through the incorporation of XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) support and the implementation a revised Web interface... The Single-Point-of-Development interface allows a Windows PC running Natural version 6 to access Natural programs running on Unix and mainframes -- thus combining the flexible development potential found on a Windows operating system with the stability and performance of mainframe and Unix. Using Single-Point-of-Development, programs created in Windows can be modified directly on the server platform, thereby addressing versioning and synchronizing issues flowing from the need to save code separately on multiple platforms. Single-Point-of-Development is available not only for the core Natural system, but also for four Natural add-ons: Natural Construct, Natural Engineer, Predict and Mainframe Navigator. These additional Natural engineering tools can therefore also be used via the Single-Point-of-Development interface..." See general references in "XML and Databases."

• [December 09, 2003] "Blue Titan Advances Industry's First Enterprise SOA Fabric. Network Director 2.5 Delivers Increased Scalability and Extensibility." - "Blue Titan Software, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of Network Director 2.5, the industry's first and only enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) Fabric. Network Director 2.5 introduces significant improvements in scalability and extensibility validated directly from numerous real-world Fortune 500 customer deployments. Network Director 2.5 is the first and only enterprise SOA Fabric that provides a unified control layer, bringing security, reliability and manageability to Web service-based interactions and enabling enterprises to realize the true value of Web services. Network Director 2.5 allows users to define, enforce and adapt consistent enterprise-wide infrastructure policies in a distributed, non-invasive approach... Network Director 2.5 meets the growing scalability requirements of large enterprise customers. Network Director 2.5 now delivers: (1) Proven scalability up to 2,000 messages per second and beyond in a distributed deployment using only commodity-based Linux hardware; (2) Throughput throttled and increased with zero administrative effort in configuration or deployment; (3) Deployment across multiple network topologies and line of business boundaries in a geographically transparent manner. Network Director 2.5's unparalleled extensibility is already helping customers create adaptable Enterprise SOAs. Using Blue Titan's extensible policy framework, a customer created and deployed a highly customized service-#PPQb ased, priority access policy based on real-time network availability that is re-useable for any service across the SOA Fabric. One customer met their immediate need to address Web services security concerns while simultaneously scaling out an Enterprise SOA by integrating a best-in-class XML firewall into their Blue Titan Fabric as a third party security policy implementer, effectively creating a secure SOAP channel. Two Fortune 100 customers created custom management and visibility applications using Blue Titan Fabric services. These projects each took less than two weeks, demonstrating the ease of leveraging Fabric services; and enabling customers to avoid creating silos of critical operational metadata within proprietary management consoles..."

• [December 08, 2003] "Sun's Radical New Java System Software Wins Whitehall Approval. Sun Microsystems and the UK Government Sign Software Purchasing Agreement to Offer the Public Sector Open, Secure Software Technology and Reduced IT Costs." - "Sun Microsystems announced today that it has secured a strategic five year agreement with the UK's Office of Government Commerce (OGC), that will allow public sector organizations to realize significant value-for-money savings when purchasing desktop and enterprise software. The arrangement, which is effective immediately and includes the Sun Java Desktop System and the Sun Java Enterprise System, offers the Public Sector a genuine alternative to costly licensing agreements. The OGC, part of HM Treasury and the central purchasing body for the UK Government, seeks to maximize value for money for the public sector in all areas of procurement. It has entered into the arrangement with Sun as it felt the company's Java Enterprise System and Java Desktop System offered great potential to support the requirements of the UK public sector in terms of size and strategic nature of its operations, and volumes of software being purchased within it. The Java System software is based on a secure, open architecture delivering compelling value - all key requirements for the UK public sector. The use of 'proof of concept' trials in government organizations will look at the practicalities and potential to generate significant value-for-money improvements. 'The UK Public Sector is faced with huge IT purchasing decisions, it requires best value desktop and underlying software architecture that is based on open standards, predictable pricing models and infinite right to use,' said Scott McNealy, chairman, president and CEO of Sun. 'Our arrangement with the OGC, delivers transparent IT buying to the UK public sector and introduces competition in the desktop space'..."

• [December 08, 2003] "CA Ships Innovative Solution to Monitor and Manage Web Services Across and Beyond the Enterprise. Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management Ensures Reliability and Performance for On-Demand Computing." - "Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced the general availability of Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM), the first complete solution for monitoring and managing Web services across and beyond the enterprise. Unicenter WSDM is the latest addition to CA's portfolio of end-to-end management solutions that help customers build enterprise-class reliability and security into their Web services applications and supporting infrastructure. By automatically discovering, testing and monitoring Web services, Unicenter WSDM enables IT organizations to closely track a full range of performance indicators and rapidly respond to service interruptions. Web services are emerging as key business enablers for efficiency of business processes within the enterprise, and to facilitate commerce beyond the enterprise. Effective management of Web services is therefore essential for ensuring the reliability and performance of on-demand computing environments. MapPoint, the technology behind Microsoft's mapping and location services platforms and applications, plans to use Unicenter WSDM to provide visibility into 15 million daily transactions. 'Microsoft MapPoint views the ability to provide personalized support and care of its customers as essential in the competitive services business,' said Jeff Carson, group operations manager of the MapPoint Business Unit at Microsoft Corp. 'With Unicenter WSDM, MapPoint is able to provide detailed, customer-specific help and analysis during customers' development and production life-cycle phases.' Managing J2EE and .NET Web services natively at the services network level, Unicenter WSDM: (1) Optimizes performance of Web services through real-time monitoring of metrics such as response times, transaction volume and message size. (2) Speeds deployment of management capabilities through automatic detection, discovery and cataloging of newly-deployed Web services in the enterprise. (3) Improves application availability by ensuring that Web services are responsive and performing at appropriate service levels. (4) Reduces costs and complexity of Web services by providing a central point-of-management with advanced reporting and predictive analysis capabilities. (5) Increases enterprise responsiveness through non-intrusive monitoring and automatic detection of problems and service failures, real-time alerts and self-configuration capabilities..."

• [December 08, 2003] "XyEnterprise Releases Version 1.1 of XPP Web Services Toolkit. New XPP Personal Edition Available." - "XyEnterprise, the leading developer of XML content management and enterprise publishing software, announced today that it has released version 1.1 of its XML Professional Publisher (XPP) Web Services Toolkit. XyEnterprise also announced the availability of XPP Personal Edition, a new single-user version of its proven XML publishing software. Both offerings are available now and add to the numerous deployment options of XyEnterprise's leading XML rendering and transformation technology. Version 1.1 of the XPP Web Services Toolkit builds on the proven capabilities of the initial release, adding functions for e-mail notification, support for SOAP attachments, improved file manipulation capability, and other enhancements. Through the standards-based XPP Web Services interface, XPP users can proof, modify, and publish their documents in a browser from virtually any location. XPP and its Web Services offerings are used by companies such as LexisNexis, Letterpart, and others to profit from a more seamless content management and publishing lifecycle while reducing deployment time, training, and support costs. XPP Personal Edition is a new offering designed to meet the needs of users who require the sophisticated composition controls of XPP in a single-user environment. Customers include individual users who have had prior experience with XPP at larger organizations, initial deployments in specialty publishing environments (such as STM journals or reference guides), or remote contributors working for larger organizations. XPP Personal Edition includes the XyView interactive interface with composition and editing functionality, the CITI module for generating Contents, Indices, Tables, and Illustrations, and a choice of two Hyphenation and Justification dictionaries from the over 30 languages supported by XPP. Other optional components (including MathML, XyDiff, EDGAR, and other specialized items) are also available... XML Professional Publisher (XPP) is the proven standards-based composition, transformation and rendering software for complex and automated publishing in the technical documentation, commercial, legal, journal, financial, and pharmaceutical publishing markets. Leading corporations use XPP to process and transform XML and other structured content into high quality PDF and print output. XPP's Web Services Toolkit is driving new ways to conduct publishing operations and enhance the content lifecycle, creating new opportunities for customer satisfaction, product revenue, and business growth..."

• [December 08, 2003] "Oracle Leads Development of Open Standards for Human Resources Software, Helps Customers Automate Information Exchange and Reduce Integration Costs. Oracle Human Resources Management System One of First to Receive HR-XML Certification." - "Oracle Corp. today announced that Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS) is one of the first human resources software suites to successfully achieve HR-XML certification for effortless communication between Oracle HRMS customers and their business partners. HR-XML, developed by the HR-XML Consortium, is an open data exchange standard that enables secure, automated communication between companies. By leveraging one common data standard for human resources-related information -- resumes, job postings, competencies, performance metrics, timecards, benefits enrollment, payroll contributions, and background checks -- HR-XML helps companies cut integration costs and improve efficiencies by eliminating the multiple interfaces historically required to accommodate different data formats... Leveraging Oracle's extensive network of human resources partners, HR-XML enables Oracle HRMS customers to quickly gain access to fully integrated solutions, services and content from leading companies such as Mohomine, HireRight and Magnaware. Prior to the HR-XML standard, companies had to develop interfaces for each of these partners. Now one interface is created for data exchanges between all partners, helping minimize integration costs and complexity. "The HR-XML certification for Oracle HRMS is further testament to Oracle's commitment to open standards that promote simple and secure information exchange between businesses," said Bill Kerr, principal software engineer at Oracle and member of the HR-XML Consortium Board of Directors. "This is a customer-driven initiative focused on helping companies overcome the barriers normally associated with exchanging information with other businesses and fostering better communication practices." As part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle HRMS helps companies manage all aspects of the workforce, including payroll and expense management, recruiting and hiring, benefits administration, training, and performance management. While other HR applications provide limited snapshots of the workforce, Oracle HRMS integrates with all business areas to provide a comprehensive view of the workforce and performance in the enterprise. The improved visibility and analysis capabilities help companies make better HR decisions, such as when to hire key skill areas based on predicted future shortfalls and demand, for improved performance and cost savings..." General references in "HR-XML Consortium."

• [December 05, 2003] "Web Editor Framework Out of Beta. Ontopia Announces Ontopia Knowledge Suite Release 2.0." - "Ontopia AS, the world's leading vendor of topic map technology, announced Release 2.0 of the Ontopia Knowledge Suite, which will be available from 19 December 2003. This major release of the OKS brings: (1) the full release of the Web Editor Framework for building custom topic map authoring environments; (2) extension of the query language to cover tasks that had required either API programming or use of the Navigator Framework tag libraries, new built-in predicates now allow querying all parts of a topic map; (3) support for import and export of RDF data to topic maps; (4) the popular free-download, Omnigator, now includes support for hierarchy visualization... Steve Pepper, Founder of Ontopia, says 'Now, finally, the Topic Maps community has a real, powerful, flexible tool for editing Topic Maps. Implementations in Norway and the UK are already using the Web Editor Framework to create custom editing environments.' The OKS uses the powerful Topic Maps model to enable the rapid development of complex systems. Using the OKS, integrators can create representations of diverse information and knowledge models, and then access and manipulate them with a common tool set and query language. 'I am really pleased with the new RDF support in OKS 2.0 and Omnigator VII because it finally bridges the gap between these two closely related knowledge technologies, enabling users to easily move data back and forth between topic maps and RDF,' remarked Lars Marius Garshol, Development Manager. 'The most important aspect of the approach we've taken is that it allows users to use the same vocabularies with both RDF and topic maps.' The OKS, a Java toolkit for applying Topic Maps functionality, consists of a topic map engine with scalable API, J2EE-compliant toolkits for development of editing and browsing applications, full-text search, schema tools, persistent and scalable storage of topic maps in an RDBMS..." General references in "(XML) Topic Maps."

• [December 02, 2003] "HR-XML Assessments Standard Enables End-to-End Talent Management. Data Interchange Specification Offers More Timely, Better Integrated Assessments." - "Employers that use assessments as part of their workforce management strategy will benefit from a new standard that makes it easier to integrate assessments into the workflow and decision-support framework of recruiting and HR management systems. The new standard, approved in a vote by the more than 100 member organizations of the HR-XML Consortium, provides employers the flexibility and efficiencies of being able to order, manage, and apply assessments from within their HR or recruiting solution of choice. 'In-depth assessments provide a strong foundation for important decisions about people in the workplace,' said Romuald Restout, Product Architect, Recruitsoft, Inc., and leader of the HR-XML Assessments Project Team. 'The HR-XML Consortium's Assessments standard has been created so organizations can more efficiently integrate a collection of third-party assessment instruments within an employer's workforce management solution,' according to Restout. 'By applying a more systematic approach to the integration process, organizations can centralize the process and generate improvements in productivity that contribute to the bottom-line,' he explained. Version 1.0 of the HR-XML Consortium's Assessments Standard is designed to support orders to third-party suppliers of assessment services as well as the return of assessment status and results. The Assessments standard can be applied to assessments of 'hard skills,' such as those acquired through training and education, as well as soft skills, such as customer orientation, analytical thinking, and leadership. The HR-XML Consortium's Assessment's Workgroup is planning future releases of the standard that will support additional options, such as the discovery of available assessment instruments based on the particular competencies an employer may want to assess. 'Employers are interested in the higher return on investment that quality employees deliver. In turn, employers are using assessment solutions in all stages of the human capital lifecycle to ensure they develop employees with the right skills and that they promote people into the positions where they will succeed,' said Shawn Lyndon, CTO, ePredix. 'The HR-XML Consortium's Assessments Standard better serves employers by opening the door to easy integration of a wide variety of assessment tools within HR systems,' according to Lyndon..." See: (1) details in the news story "HR-XML Consortium Approves Assessments Specification for Skills Evaluation"; (2) general references in "HR-XML Consortium."

• [December 01, 2003] "New Version of Adobe FrameMaker Extends Powerful XML Capabilities. Upgrade Includes New Migration, Import Features and Support for Popular Graphics Formats to Capitalize on Existing Assets." - "Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced Adobe FrameMaker 7.1, an upgrade to its award winning, enterprise-class authoring and publishing solution. FrameMaker combines the simplicity of word processing with the power of Extensible Markup Language (XML), making it easier to repurpose content and publish to multiple channels, including print, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and the Web. FrameMaker 7.1 includes new features for cross-referencing between documents and allows multiple variations of a document to be stored as a single file. With FrameMaker 7.1 users can now migrate legacy technical documents and assets from Quark XPress and Adobe PageMaker formats, while expanded support for popular graphics file formats means Adobe Photoshop files can be imported directly into FrameMaker, saving valuable time... FrameMaker gives corporate users the ability to easily create, edit and import valid XML content in full WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode when authoring documents. FrameMaker 7.1 introduces conditional text support for XML to allow multiple variations of an XML document to be stored in a single file. This greatly streamlines the production of documentation with subtle content variations, such as region-specific information for different electrical requirements or warranty and customer service details. FrameMaker 7.1 extends its cross-referencing features to allow links between XML documents. For example, a product installation guide in XML can now reference and provide a direct link to a specific section in a user manual that is also in XML format. Based on user feedback, an automatic save to XML feature was added so that users don't have to remember to select a special 'save as' function when editing XML documents -- a simple save or file close will automatically save the document to the correct format... New filters enable PageMaker and Quark XPress files to be easily migrated into FrameMaker. Users with legacy files in these formats can now take advantage of FrameMaker's superior long document handling and multi-channel support to publish directly to print, Adobe PDF, HTML, XML and other formats. Corporate publishers can work more efficiently by importing Photoshop files directly into FrameMaker 7.1, eliminating the need to save files to an intermediate format. Other additions include support for the JPEG 2000 graphics format and improved filters for handling artwork in Adobe PDF, including native files from Adobe Illustrator. Expanded support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) means a single graphics file can be the source for both high quality vector graphics in print and PDF as well as an interactive, high quality vector graphic on the Web..."

• [November 19, 2003] "Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) Ratified as OASIS Standard. Abridean, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Business Layers, Computer Associates, Entrust, Netegrity, OpenNetwork, Waveset, and Others Develop OASIS Standard for Exchanging User, Resource, and Service Provisioning Information." - "The OASIS standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. SPML provides an XML-based framework for managing the allocation of system resources within and between organizations. Encompassing the entire life-cycle management of resources, SPML defines the provisioning of digital services such as user accounts and access privileges on systems, networks and applications, as well as non-digital or physical resources such as cell phones and credit cards. 'As provisioning becomes a more widely available network service, the need for an open standard to support the integration of account and service management in identity infrastructures is clear,' says Darran Rolls of Waveset, chair of the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee. 'By fostering interoperability across business units or with business partners, SPML frees companies to focus on the business rules for provisioning user accounts and not on the technology to wire everything together.' 'Enterprise architects should consider SPML real and deployable,' said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. 'It provides a much needed starting point for a long-term user access provisioning strategy that can be implemented today within the enterprise and will work in the future for integrating with Web services implementations. We congratulate the developers of SPML 1.0 and invite additional participation from the community on advancing SPML 2.0 to achieve full Web services compatibility.' Members of the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee include Abridean, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Business Layers, Computer Associates, Entrust, Netegrity, OpenNetwork, Waveset, and other users and providers of identity management software. SPML relates closely to another OASIS Standard, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). Together, SPML and SAML provide a standard way to create user accounts and validate users as part of an identity management infrastructure. The two offer the basis for integrating single sign-on and provisioning software for Web services..." See: (1) "SPML Provisioning and Identity Management Specification Balloted for Approval"; (2) general references in "XML-Based Provisioning Services."

• [November 18, 2003] "J2EE 1.4 Specification Wins Unanimous Vote of Approval from the Java Community Process. New Standard for Web Services Interoperability Also Licensed Under Open Source Terms to Apache Software Foundation and JBoss Group. For First Time J2EE 1.4 Platform SDK to Include Fully Deployable Application Server Based on Developer Release of Sun Java System Application Server 8 Platform Edition." - "Sun Microsystems, Inc., the inventor and leading advocate of Java technology, today announced that the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition [J2EE] version 1.4 specification was approved by the Java Community Process (JCP) in a unanimous vote making it the industry's approved platform for Web services interoperability. This accomplishment for the Java community is marked with another Web services industry-leading move to license the new specification and its Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) under new license terms friendly to non-profit and open source projects. Apache Software Foundation and JBoss Group are demonstrating their commitment to the compatible J2EE technology industry, a key value proposition for the IT industry, by being amongst the first open source organizations to license the J2EE 1.4 specification and CTS. 'With nearly four million downloads and over 30 licensees, the J2EE platform and Software Developer Kit (SDK) are being established as the popular choice and premier platform for Java and Web services development,' said Mark Bauhaus, Vice President of Java Web Services for Sun Microsystems. 'The delivery of the J2EE 1.4 specification realizes the vision of an architecture that fuses Web services standards and the Java platform, and represents the most complete implementation of the WS-I Basic Profile that provides cross-vendor Web services interoperability.' Shared with a wide community of developers who contributed to the design of the J2EE 1.4 standard through the JCP, Sun brings to developers the best in Java Web services technology that is the first to support the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Basic Profile. The J2EE 1.4 specification also includes improved deployment and management capabilities to help developers accelerate time to market for their Web services applications. Complete information about the J2EE 1.4 specification can be found on the web. 'We received a clear message from the J2EE technology community to provide complete support for Web services standards and interfaces,' said Mark Hapner, Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems and co-spec lead of the J2EE 1.4 specification. 'Sun took this challenge and in collaboration with the J2EE 1.4 Expert Group, we believe we have delivered the most interoperable and standard Web services platform in the form of this important Java specification, Reference Implementation and Software Developer Kit.' Taking advantage of open source license terms for J2EE 1.4 specification that Sun is making available for non-profit and open source projects, Apache Software Foundation and JBoss Group have licensed the J2EE specification and CTS to bring the benefits of Java technology compatibility to their open source communities for development and deployment. This will lead to increased adoption of J2EE technology through a broader community of developers and further popularize this premier middleware platform. The new licensing provisions were introduced by the JCP program through the JCP 2.5 process document and require that all Java specifications allow for development and distribution of compatible independent implementations, make specification products available separately and offer Technology Compatibility Kits (TCK) free of charge to qualified non-profits, educational organizations and individuals..."

• [November 18, 2003] "OMG, OAGI, and POSC Join WS-I. New Associate Membership Category Extends Communication and Cooperation Among Key Web Services Organizations." - "Today, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced that the Object Management Group (OMG), the Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGI), and the Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC) have become associate members of WS-I. This new membership category was created to improve communication and cooperation between WS-I and standards development organizations to best meet the needs of customers and the Web services industry. The announcement was made at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit being held this week in Baltimore. 'While WS-I and standards organizations like the ones announced today have different purposes, we share a common vision for the future of Web services,' said Ed Cobb, board director and chair of the WS-I Liaison Committee. 'WS-I is committed to building and maintaining strong relationships with these organizations, and the associate membership category enables these organizations to participate more directly in the work of WS-I. In addition, WS-I continues to work with other standards organizations through informal liaison channels.' [...] Associate member benefits to qualified organizations include access to the WS-I member website and its documents, access to technical working group materials, participation in technical working groups and community meetings, and the use of the WS-I logo... WS-I is an open industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. The organization unites a diverse community of Web services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices, and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services. Since its formation in February 2002, more than 170 companies have joined WS-I..." General references in "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."

• [November 18, 2003] "The Java Community Process Program Celebrates Five Years of Excellence in Community-Based Java Technology Development. Outstanding Track Record Makes the JCP IT's Premier Organization for the Development of the Java Technology Binary Software Standard." - "On behalf of the members of the Java Community Process (JCP) program, the JCP Program Management Office (PMO) today announced at ApacheCon, that December 2003 marks its fifth anniversary of providing successful support for community collaboration for the development of high-quality Java technology standards. Today's announcement coincides with the publishing of the final results of the JCP Executive Committees (EC) 2003 elections. Tasked in their EC roles with guiding the evolution of Java technology and shaping the future of the JCP program itself, the new and reelected members to the JCP ECs will take office on November 25, 2003... 233 JSRs were submitted to the JCP program since the process began in 1998, representing an average of 45 new specifications per year. About a third of the submitted JSRs have been completed. Introduced by Sun in 1995, the JCP was formalized in December 1998 as a community based program for evolving and maintaining Java technology. The community has steadily grown into an open organization of international Java technology developers whose charter is to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations and technology compatibility kits. With a membership made up of more than 680 participants, the JCP program boasts having the most advanced Java technology expertise in the industry and top developer talent. Experts from leading IT corporations, developer communities including the open source community, academia and individual developers work together under the JCP to deliver on the promise of Java technology compatibility. They balance consensus with speed to develop and maintain a comprehensive standards-based platform that benefits entire industries... The future direction of the JCP program is outlined in JSR 215 which, based on feedback from specification leads, experts, EC members and the JCP Program Office, proposes a series of changes aimed at increasing the transparency and the efficiency of the process while maintaining the focus of the community on the establishment of the Java technology binary software standard. The proposed specification draft is in advanced approval stages by the community and the ECs and is expected to be delivered in early 2004. Since its introduction in 1998 as the open, inclusive process to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits, the Java Community Process program has fostered the evolution of the Java platform in cooperation with the international Java developer community. The JCP has over 680 company and individual participants; more than 200 Java technology specifications are in development in the JCP program out of which 46% are in final stages..."

• [November 12, 2003] "The SNIA Teams with INCITS To Standardize Storage Management Interface. Action Puts SNIA Specification on Fast Track to Status as American National Standard." - "The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced they have reached agreement to take the SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) through the INCITS Fast Track process. The process, reserved for specifications that have already gone through rigorous technical review, is expected to result in SMI-S becoming an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard in the second quarter of 2004. Sheila Childs, chair of the SNIA, said, 'Our organization views the strategic alliance with INCITS as a significant milestone. The Storage Management Initiative Specification directly addresses the needs of storage users throughout the world for greater interoperability and lower costs. Our partnership with INCITS is key to fulfilling our goal of standardization through a formal ANSI-accredited standards body, allowing vendors and users alike to adopt SMI-S compliant products with complete confidence.' Pat Morris, Executive Director of INCITS, said, 'The fundamental interoperability of multi-vendor components in storage networks has been a key concern for both vendors and end users. Work on the Storage Management Initiative Specification has been underway by a group of more than 30 companies and organizations through the SNIA for two years. It is time to use the INCITS Fast Track process so we will have an American National standard within months.' The Storage Management Interface Specification is the result of several years of collaborative effort by the SNIA members representing a cross section of storage manufacturers, integrators, OEMs and end users from around the world. The specification defines an open system standard application program interface (API), allowing applications to manage storage devices manufactured by all of the industry leaders. SMI-S 1.0 represents the first step of several planned iterations of the specification to extend from standardizing storage management of SANs, to NAS, iSCSI and other storage networking technologies. The SNIA's Storage Management Initiative includes extensive interoperability testing in the association's SMI-Lab, comprehensive education programs and tools for developers, and demonstrations of the new technology. These combined efforts have already resulted in a robust specification that has been extensively field tested..." General references in "SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S)."

• [November 12, 2003] "Sun's Java Enterprise System Provides Immediate Support for Next Generation of Liberty Alliance Specifications. Sun Java System Identity Server Delivers Support for Liberty Alliance Phase 2 Specification for Secure Federated Identity. Early Access Available for Qualified Customers." - "Sun Microsystems Inc., a founding member of the Liberty Alliance Project, today announced that its market-leading Java System Identity Server is the industry's first commercial product from a software platform vendor to support the Liberty Alliance Phase 2 specifications. This support expands the broad functionality of the Sun Java System Identity Server, a key component of the Java Enterprise System, further enabling the deployment and adoption of secure and federated identity-based Web services to fixed and mobile users' devices. 'Open standards are fundamental to the development of secure, federated identity solutions and Web services. Expanding on our support for the Liberty Alliance specifications will help our customers deliver mobility with security -- the right services to the right people at the right time on any device,' said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of software for Sun Microsystems. 'Identity is a critical component for secure delivery and deployment of the network services that help our customers gain a competitive advantage in an ever-changing marketplace.' The integrated identity services of the Java Enterprise System -- access management, directory, provisioning and delegated administration -- provide the best offering for customers to reap the benefits of federated network identity. The Java Enterprise System allows Sun customers to leverage functionality of the current and future Liberty specifications through the Java System Identity Server. Early access to the Java System Identity Server's latest Liberty functionality is available for qualified Sun customers today... The Java System Identity Server was the industry's first commercial-grade identity management solution to support both SAML and the Liberty Phase 1 protocols. Sun is the first software platform vendor to support the Liberty Phase two specifications. The J2EE-based architecture of Java System Identity Server makes it the preferred developer solution for 'identity-enabling' mobile and data Web services. Java System Identity Server uses role-based access control mechanisms to centrally create and manage users, delegate user administration, and define the access policies for users on intranets and extranets... The Liberty Phase 2 specifications are critical for deploying an effective federated identity infrastructure. Expanding upon the Phase 1 specifications, which allow for cross-domain single sign-on, these new specifications add support for cross-domain attribute exchange and a foundation for Liberty-based Web services. A federated identity architecture allows an authenticated identity to seamlessly take part in targeted Web services from multiple organizations or Web domains that have business agreements in place. This brings greater efficiencies for employee identity management, creates new market and revenue opportunities between business partners, and increases the end-user's control over identity information while facilitating their access to valuable Web services..." See details in the news story: "Liberty Alliance Publishes Final Phase 2 Specifications and Previews Phase 3." General references in "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization." [source]

• [November 10, 2003] "Adobe Extends Commitment to XML Standards with Acquisition of Yellow Dragon Software. Acquired Technology Assets Enable Native ebXML Support in Adobe's Intelligent Document Platform and Streamline Collaboration Across the Extended Enterprise. - "Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that it has acquired the technology assets of privately held Yellow Dragon Software, a developer of XML messaging and metadata management software. The acquisition will deliver technology that further strengthens Adobe's XML architecture, which enables businesses and governments to combine the powerful data and business logic capabilities of XML with the rich presentation and enhanced security capabilities of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Yellow Dragon provides a commercial, off-the-shelf ebXML (Electronic Business eXtensible Markup Language) solution using an XML registry, as well as a messaging product, for reliably delivering XML messages between servers. The ebXML specification is a technical framework for using XML in a consistent manner in the exchange of electronic business data. By enabling native support for ebXML transactions within the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform and PDF, Adobe is making it faster and easier for organizations to automate their external business processes and protect their investments using open standards. Adobe plans to integrate this technology into its server products next year. 'The addition of Yellow Dragon is a powerful extension to the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform,' said Ivan Koon, senior vice president at Adobe. 'We believe Yellow Dragon's technology will enable us to offer XML functionality which will be mandated by governments and businesses over the next few years. We also gain experienced engineers who are active in the XML standards arena, and who helped define the ebXML standard.' 'The core team at Yellow Dragon has been involved in the XML standards effort since the beginning,' said Duane Nickull, executive vice president and co-founder of Yellow Dragon. 'Joining the Adobe team will help ensure that our XML technologies enjoy broad adoption as the need for document services grows in the market. We look forward to continuing to deliver new XML technologies that will solve customers' document problems.' Sponsored by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), ebXML is a globally developed open XML specification that provides a standard method to exchange business messages, conduct trading relationships, communicate data in common terms, and define and register business processes. The ebXML standard is being widely adopted by governments and manufacturers worldwide..." General references also in "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)."

• [November 10, 2003] "OASIS Members Advance Protocol for Monitoring and Controlling Asynchronous Web Services." - "Members of the OASIS international standards consortium have begun work on a specification to enable the control and monitoring of asynchronous or long-running Web services. The OASIS Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) Technical Committee is developing an extension of the World Wide Web Consortium's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) that will accommodate latency between the request for a resource or service and its actual return. ASAP is applicable for areas as diverse as workflow, business process management, e-commerce, data mining, and mobile wireless devices. 'Not all services are instantaneous -- especially when transactions involve human intervention or approval,' observed Jeffrey Ricker, chair of the OASIS ASAP Technical Committee. 'Probably the biggest breakthrough ASAP can offer is the ability to treat manual processes as Web services. Mass integration need no longer be held hostage by the weakest link. Mass integration can proceed without waiting for full automation of every process in every organization.' OASIS ASAP Technical Committee members include representatives of Computer Associates, DataPower, Fujitsu, and others. Participation remains open to all organizations and individuals, and OASIS provides mechanisms for public review and comment..." See: (1) Call for Participation in OASIS Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) TC"; (2) general references in "Asynchronous Transactions and Web Services."

• [November 5, 2003] "Sun to Open a Wal-Mart Compliant RFID Test Center. New Director of Auto-ID Business Unit Claims New Facility Will Speed Supplier Compliance to Wal-Mart Standards." - "Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that it will open an RFID test center where Wal-Mart suppliers can test their RFID solutions to guarantee compliance with the Wal-Mart standard. 'The impact of Wal-Mart's Radio Frequency ID (RFID) mandate to its suppliers is enormous and will change the way manufacturers and suppliers track inventory,' said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of Sun software. 'RFID is a game changer for retailers, manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies to name just a few of the impacted industries. Sun is committed to providing open, standards-based RFID middleware software that leverages our Sun Java Enterprise System." The Wal-Mart imposed January 1, 2005 deadline is the first step in the worlds largest retailer's move to implement RFID in its inventory management system store-wide. Wal-Mart will use the Electronic Product Code (EPC) compliant RFID technology for identifying, tracking and tracing deliveries and inventory. Wal-Mart's hundreds of suppliers must take action now to ensure they will remain on the shelves of the retail giant. Because the Wal-Mart Test Center and the RFID Test Centers are built using the same technology, its suppliers can test their RFID solution first with Sun to ensure compliance with Wal-Mart's RFID specifications. 'Sun's target design point has been aimed at reliable, scalable, manageable, secure systems and is a natural fit for supporting RFID based systems,' said Julie Sarbacker, Sun's director of the Auto-ID Business Unit. 'We've been working with customers to determine the most cost effective way to help with compliance to Wal-Mart requirements and needed to provide hands-on access to the technology and systems needed. With this new center, we aim to reduce the time and expense suppliers will have to undergo to support Wal-Mart's requirements.' The Sun RFID test center will be located in Dallas, Texas, and will be open to Wal-Mart's suppliers by December 2003. The Sun RFID Test Center will be powered by the Solaris Operating System using Sun Java Enterprise Software and the Sun standards-based implementation of Savant with additional value around self-healing and provisioning of EPC readers. Customers will also be able to test RFID technology in conjunction with Sun's Java Enterprise Software to smoothly integrate this technology into their existing technology strategy. Sun Services will team with the suppliers to provide the IT consulting expertise, using best practices to ensure that their solution is architected and implemented to maximize return on investment and minimize total cost of ownership in the most timely and efficient way. For more information on Sun's early involvement with RFID and the RFID Test Center, visit http://www.sun.com/software/solutions/auto_id/ Suppliers who want to start testing in the Sun RFID Test Center should contact Sun at autoid-testcenter@sun.com..." See: (1) "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Resources and Readings"; (2) "Physical Markup Language (PML) Core Specification Version 1.0 for EPC Objects."

• [October 28, 2003] "FTC Issues Report on How to Promote Innovation Through Balancing Competition with Patent Law and Policy." - "The Federal Trade Commission today issued its report on how to promote innovation by finding the proper balance of competition and patent law and policy. Although both competition in markets and patents for inventors can work together to foster innovation, the report states that each policy requires a proper balance with the other to do so. 'Consumers and innovators win when patents and competition policy are aligned in the proper balance. Although questionable patents can harm competition and innovation, valid patents work well with competition to promote innovation. This Report analyzes and makes recommendations for the patent system to maintain the proper balance with competition,' said Timothy J. Muris, FTC Chairman. Today's report -- which makes recommendations for the patent system -- is the first of two reports about how to maintain that balance. A forthcoming second report by the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) will make similar recommendations for antitrust law. Among the ten recommendations of today's report, the FTC proposes legislative and regulatory changes to improve patent quality. Patents of questionable validity can slow further innovation and raise costs to consumers. Specifically, the report recommends: (1) Creating a new administrative procedure that will make it easier for firms to challenge a patent's validity at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), without having to raise an expensive and time-consuming federal court challenge; (2) Allowing courts to find patents invalid based on the preponderance of the evidence, without having to find that clear and convincing evidence compels that result. The current standard of 'clear and convincing evidence' undermines courts' ability to weed out questionable patents. This is especially troubling, since certain PTO procedures and rules tend to favor the issuance of patents. The report also recommends that Congress limit the award of treble damages for willful patent infringement. Some hearings participants explained that they do not read their competitors' patents because of concern that learning about others' innovations will expose them to treble damages infringement liability. Failure to read competitors' patents, however, can harm innovation and competition. The FTC's recommended legislative change would allow firms to read patents to learn about new innovations and to survey the patent landscape to assess potential infringement issues, yet would retain a viable willfulness doctrine that protects both wronged patentees and competition..." See also: (1) "W3C Presents Prior Art Filing to USPTO and Urges Removal of Eolas Patent"; (2) "Patents and Open Standards."

• [October 27, 2003] "Industry Milestone: New Standard for Online Content Ready for Prime Time. Time Inc., LexisNexis, Hearst Publishing, Platts/McGraw-Hill, ProQuest and Others to Begin Using PRISM Aggregator Specification for Content Delivery and Acquisition." - "Publishers, aggregators, syndicators and other content companies are now ready to exchange content for secondary licensing using a standardized XML format -- the newly released PRISM specification, the PRISM Aggregator DTD (Document Type Definition) Version 1.0. Time Inc., a founding member of the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) Working Group involved in development of the new DTD, is working with its aggregator partners, including PRISM members LexisNexis and ProQuest, to put the new format into production by the end of this year... The new PRISM Aggregator DTD was developed by members of PRISM, an IDEAlliance Working Group, in close cooperation with publishers and content aggregators. The new DTD is a use case of the PRISM specification offering a standard format for publishers to mark up and transmit magazine and journal content to aggregators and to push data to their internal web sites... By providing the industry with a standardized vocabulary and rules for defining content electronically, the PRISM Aggregator DTD enables aggregators to lower their costs of bringing new sources of information online. It also enables them to publish the content online more quickly, making it more valuable both to them and to the owners of that content... The Aggregator DTD is the result of a comprehensive review of publisher and aggregator requirements begun in September 2002. The DTD, combined with extensive documentation and samples, is now available for download from the PRISM website. It is being put into testing and production by companies such as Time Inc., LexisNexis, ProQuest, Hearst Publishing and The McGraw-Hill Companies' Platts division. The PRISM aggregator DTD includes basic structural elements found in any serial publication or web-based editorial, such as paragraph headings, photographs and sub-headings. Future releases of the DTD will include additional elements to aid searching and to help track copyright ownership, rights and permissions information, and license agreements. The PRISM working group has adopted well-established industry standards as part of its specifications. The PRISM Aggregator DTD provides customization of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XHTML standard and a set of PRISM metadata that augments the widely-accepted Dublin Core metadata standard. Where appropriate, PRISM will continue to adopt additional complimentary standards in the future. The PRISM specification was first released in April of 2001..." See also: (1) the news story "XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence"; (2) "Atom as the New XML-Based Web Publishing and Syndication Format"; (3) general references in "Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM)."

• [October 23, 2003] "DoD Announces Radio Frequency Identification Policy." - "The Department of Defense announced today the establishment of a Radio Frequency Identification Policy (RFID). RFID technology greatly improves the management of inventory by providing hands-off processing. The equipment quickly accounts for and identifies massive inventories, enhancing the processing of materiel transactions to allow DoD to realign resources and streamline business processes. Implementation of RFID minimizes time spent through the normal means of inventory processing. This technology allows the improvement of data quality, items management, asset visibility, and maintenance of materiel. Further, RFID will enable DoD to improve business functions and facilitate all aspects of the DoD supply chain. The new policy will require suppliers to put passive RFID tags on the lowest possible piece part/case/pallet packaging by January 2005. Acknowledging the impact on DoD suppliers, the department plans to host an RFID Summit for Industry in February 2004. The RFID policy and implementation strategy will be finalized by June 2004. RFID policy and the corresponding RFID tagging/labeling of DoD materiel are applicable to all items except bulk commodities such as sand, gravel or liquids..." See: (1) "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Resources and Readings" and (2) "Physical Markup Language (PML) for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)."

• [October 20, 2003] "Oracle and Corel to Provide Open Standard Content Solutions. Corel Integrates XML and SVG Tools with Newly Introduced Oracle Database 10g." - "Corel Corporation today announced that it has teamed with Oracle Corp. to build and deliver a complete solution to enable the creation, storage and delivery of XML content and SVG Smart Graphic applications. Demonstrated in the Oracle booth at Oracle World Paris this week, the solution integrates the powerful Oracle Database 10g with Corel's award-winning XML tools, Corel XMetaL and Corel Smart Graphics Studio. Corel XMetaL and Corel Smart Graphics Studio work together with the XML DB functionality in Oracle Database 10g to provide intelligent user interfaces for rich structured documents such as product documentation, financial reports, technical manuals and government legislation and regulation. Oracle's XML DB offers deep and comprehensive support for XML, a preferred format for enterprise data and content. Together with Oracle Database 10g, Corel's technologies simplify the integration of open-standard text and graphics into an enterprise publishing workflow. Corel's applications hide the complexity of open standards code from the intended end users, whether they are writers using XMetaL to create XML-based content or application developers using Corel Smart Graphics Studio to build SVG-based Smart Graphics applications. Using this new solution, enterprise customers are able to reduce costs and simplify the process of creating, managing and delivering business critical content. Corel technology provides tools that for the first time create unified interfaces that give end users the ability to interact with a full range of business information stored in their Oracle Database, from unstructured content to transactional data such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), inventory management and e-commerce applications. Announced last month, Oracle Database 10g represents a significant rethinking of the traditional role of software infrastructure in areas such as system performance, clustering and storage. Oracle 10g is the first infrastructure designed for grid computing. This integration with Oracle Database 10g builds on the strengths of Corel's enterprise XML and SVG platforms Corel XMetaL 4 and Corel Smart Graphics Studio. Corel XMetaL is an authoring platform that enables XML text content creation across an organization, streamlining the process of distributing information to the Web, print and other media. Corel Smart Graphics Studio is a development platform that speeds and simplifies the creation of SVG-based Smart Graphics applications, transforming XML and legacy data into powerful and compelling intranet and extranet applications..." See also: (1) Corel Smart Graphics Studio; (2) "Corel Smart Graphics Studio Uses SVG for Graphical Applications Development."

• [October 20, 2003] "ADX Introduces Third Generation Network for Supply Chain Integration. ADX Network Enables Any-To-Any Document Translation. Improved Network Access Tools For Suppliers Also Released." - "ADX (Advanced Data Exchange), a leading provider of supply chain integration solutions, today introduced the third generation of the ADX Network, the backbone of ADX's outsourced supply chain connectivity service that enables companies to automate transactions with all of their suppliers and partners. ADX helps large enterprises expand the success of business process automation beyond their own businesses to streamline outdated, manual processes that they share with their trading partners. The ADX Network now enables any-to-any document translation, providing large enterprises with the capability to transfer a wide array of critical business documents with suppliers using any data standard, dialect or intermediary, including all EDI, XML, VAN and flat file formats. ADX customers are not limited by standards or formats as ADX can translate any format to any format, allowing them to exchange documents with any trading partner. ADX can accommodate any XML dialect, SAP IDoc, Oracle, MIMs or EDI document and translate and transport those to a supply or demand chain rapidly, accurately and securely. In addition to announcing the third generation of ADX Network, ADX also released new versions of its ADX Network access products. Using the new ADX WebAccess and ADX Desktop, mid-size and small companies now have enhanced, easy-to-use tools to help them avoid the cost and complexity of installing and managing EDI or XML software solutions, and rely instead on ADX's simple, outsourced service. 'ADX has delivered on the promise of modernizing our supply chain relationships and improving business processes for us and our business partners,' said James McLauchlin, EDI Analyst/Coordinator, Do it Best Corp. 'The new capabilities within the ADX Network and the supplier access tools prove ADX's commitment to highly functional, cost-effective solutions for larger enterprises like Do it Best Corp. as well as suppliers in the extended supply chain.' In addition to the upgrade of the ADX Network for any-to-any document translation, ADX now offers complete AS1/AS2 interoperability. AS1/AS2 standards let large enterprises significantly reduce the high costs of EDI communications through VANs by routing transactions over the Internet through ADX Network instead. ADX customers with AS2-based supplier connectivity report secure, reliable document transportation at substantial cost savings. For suppliers, ADX WebAccess represents ADX's first completely Web-enabled access tool and gives suppliers a complete, Internet-based option to connect to the ADX Network for document exchange. Unlike other Web-based solutions, ADX WebAccess allows users to connect to multiple trading partners concurrently. ADX Desktop 3.3 offers enhanced database and back office integration through easy-to-use import/export tools..."

• [October 20, 2003] "ebXML Business Process Specification Advances Within OASIS. Fujitsu, Sterling Commerce, Cyclone Commerce, Sun Microsystems and Others Support Expanded ebXML Work at OASIS." - "Developers of the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) have decided to advance their work under the technical process of the OASIS international standards consortium. The newly formed OASIS ebXML Business Process (BP) Technical Committee will further define the royalty-free ebXML BPSS model for binary and multiparty business collaborations both within and between enterprises. ebXML BP will support the exchange of standards-based business process definitions, such as those developed by industry-specific organizations, enabling standard, interoperable process configurations that effectively meet business collaboration requirements for analysis, design, and production use. ebXML BP is part of the modular suite of specifications that enable enterprises of any size, in any global region to conduct business using the Internet. ebXML comprises open, royalty-free standards for business process collaboration, core data components, collaboration protocol agreements, messaging, and registries and repositories. ebXML implementers span the globe and include General Motors, the US Center for Disease Control, the Pan Asia e-Trade Alliance, and TransCanada Pipelines. RosettaNet has formally adopted ebXML BPSS as a mechanism for expressing business collaborations involving RosettaNet PIPs, and government agencies around the world recommend the use of ebXML. 'ebXML is the only framework that is at the same time generic and flexible and can be used for inter-administrations relations,' concluded the European Commission's Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) in its study, 'Business to Business Frameworks for IDA Networks.' 'Moreover, ebXML is clearly the only trend for organised business communities. The general recommendation is to follow ebXML standards as much as possible.' 'ebXML BP will enable legally enforceable, easily manageable, and fully traceable collaborations,' said Dale Moberg of Cyclone Commerce, convenor and proposed co-chair of the OASIS ebXML BP Technical Committee. 'Industry standards organizations will be able to use ebXML BP schemas and formats to specify business process definitions for their own collaboration communities.' The OASIS ebXML BP TC will base its work on ebXML BPSS version 1.01, jointly developed by OASIS and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (CEFACT) and on derivative work expected to be donated by a range of participants. 'We're excited to continue this work within the OASIS technical process,' noted Monica J. Martin of Sun Microsystems, proposed co-chair of the OASIS ebXML BP Technical Committee. 'OASIS provides an environment for us to adhere to the ebXML principles of a loosely coupled, highly aligned specification set, while enabling support for other emerging Web service technologies, OASIS specifications, and products from industry standards organizations'..." (1) "OASIS Members Form ebXML Business Process Technical Committee"; (2) related news in "UN/CEFACT Announces Release of Its ebXML Business Process Specification Schema Version 1.1"; (3) general references in "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)."

• [October 18, 2003] "UN/CEFACT Announces Release of Its ebXML Business Process Specification Schema Version 1.1." - "The Technologies and Methodologies Group (TMG) of the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business announce the final release of its ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) Version 1.1 prepared under the UN/CEFACT Open Development Process. Over the last 2 years interested parties from around the world have collaborated in the development of the Specification addressing a number of deficiencies implementers of Version 1.01 identified. Regarding the BPSS road map, as agreed to by the TMG in March 2003, work on Version 2.0, alignment with the UMM Meta-Model's Business Transaction View (BTV), will commence starting with the upcoming TMG meeting in December. Interested parties are invited to attend the meeting in Waidhofen/Ybbs (Austria), 8-12 December 2003. Parties interested in the BPSS V1.1 can download it from the TMG's Web Site under 'Approved Documents'. UN/CEFACT, which is based in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, and has a global remit, has led the development of international standards for electronic transactions for government, commerce and industry. Its experience and ability to bring together world class experts and match trends in information technology with business requirements, in an open and transparent way, gives UN/CEFACT a unique viewpoint..." See also: (1) related news in "ebXML Business Process Specification Advances Within OASIS. Fujitsu, Sterling Commerce, Cyclone Commerce, Sun Microsystems and Others Support Expanded ebXML Work at OASIS."; (2) general references in "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)."

• [October 15, 2003] "Liberty Alliance Launches Certification Program for Liberty-Interoperable Products and Services. Initiative Ensures Product Compatibility to Help Increase Buyer and Partner Confidence in Identity Management Products and Services." - "The Liberty Alliance Project announced a new program today that will validate products and services, which have successfully implemented the Liberty Alliance standards for federated network identity. The new certification program will help vendors, integrators and implementers ensure interoperability between Liberty-enabled solutions. This program, managed by the Liberty Alliance, will also drive overall buyer confidence in interoperability, help predict product functionality and provide a third-party reference point for both technology vendor and implementer expectations. 'Businesses, governments and other organizations want solutions based on open, mature industry standards that will cut integration costs and guarantee the long-term viability of their investment,' said Michael Barrett, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of Internet strategy at American Express. 'Standards are often open to interpretation which can harm confidence in complete interoperability. With the growing maturity and adoption of the Alliance's specifications, our work needs to focus now on alleviating the business complexity of implementing identity federation.' The Liberty Alliance interoperability certification program awards usage of the Liberty Alliance interoperability logo to products and services that have conformed with a stated version of the Liberty specifications. The vendors declaring conformance must participate in a Liberty-sponsored interoperability event, following published guidelines to prove compatibility with other Liberty-enabled products and compliance with the Liberty standard. The program is open to both members and non-members. Liberty Alliance's specifications and associated implementation guidelines offer specific features that enable organizations to build more efficient, secure and trusted identity-based web services. The ability to deploy an environment that promotes confidence and trust with employees, partners and customers will help advance the promise of single sign-on and web services. 'We've seen a growing demand from a wide variety of vertical markets express interest in Liberty conformance,' said Roger Sullivan, president and CEO of Phaos Technologies and chair of the Liberty Alliance certification sub-team. 'We believe the ability to demonstrate proven support for the Liberty standard will be important to potential buyers and users'..." General references in "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization"

• [October 15, 2003] "IPTC Approves New Versions of its NITF and NewsML Standards." - "Maintenance releases of two popular standards for sharing news have been unanimously approved at the autumn meeting of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) here. News industry representatives also approved further work on a next-generation version of NewsML that will further streamline the sharing of multimedia news files among agencies and news consumers. Upgrades to the world's most widely used XML news markup formats -- News Industry Text Format 3.2 and NewsML version 1.2 -- are part of an ongoing maintenance programme that is designed to keep both standards near the state of the art in XML. Broader development of the proposed NewsML version 2 continued, with members hearing that NewsML 2 will be compatible with previous versions. Preliminary NewsML 2 specifications are expected to be released next year. Meanwhile, NewsML users in China, Hong Kong and Macau announced plans for a regional meeting; details will be posted on the IPTC's web site. ProgramGuideML 1.0, an initiative by Japanese members for sharing television and radio programming information, gained preliminary approval. A final vote is scheduled for March 2003. The new standard will allow channel, program and time details to be sent from broadcasters to news outlets, cable system operators and web sites in a common computer-readable format. A uniform method of describing the content of photographs was also passed. The list of terms, which is expandable, can be used alone or in conjunction with any of the IPTC's XML formats. The descriptive terms are expressed as numbers, making multilingual applications easy to design. Work continues toward the News Standards Summit prior to XML Conference 2003 in Philadelphia on 8 December, 2003. The IPTC and other XML interest groups will join software designers, news system managers and system vendors in a comprehensive review of XML in the news industry. The day-long News Standards Summit will be held in conjunction with XML Conference 2003, a major trade show and education forum for the XML industry..." See: (1) "NewsML"; (2) "News Industry Text Format (NITF)"; (3) "IPTC Releases Version 3.2 Preview for News Industry Text Format (NITF)"; (4) XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence."

• [October 14, 2003] "Spotlight on Government, Military XML Applications at XML 2003. Government, Industry Representatives to Detail XML Implementations. Premier XML Industry Event Runs December 7-12 2003 in Philadelphia." - "IDEAlliance, a leading trade association dedicated to fostering XML and other information technology standards, today announced that XML Conference and Exposition 2003 will feature 14 presentations on government-related applications of XML technologies and standards. 'The U.S. federal government, state governments and the military have recognized the advantages of using XML as a basis for their applications.' says Lauren Wood, XML 2003 conference chair. 'These presentations will show various aspects of XML in practical use.' Reginald L. Hobbs, computer scientist with the Army Research Laboratory, is giving a presentation titled 'Using XML to Support Military Decision-Making' on Thurs., Dec. 11, at 2:45 p.m. 'XML is improving military efficiency in a number of areas,' says Hobbs. 'My presentation will focus on XML and XML technologies in the military decision-making process, specifically through modelling and simulation environments.' [See the PR text for other listings.] XML 2003 will feature a full schedule of educational programs on critical XML topics such as B2B, content management, government XML applications, graphics and multimedia, publishing, vertical industry applications, Web services, and more. Keynote speakers and presenters at XML 2003 will include representatives from Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems, Inc., Oracle Server Technologies, Reuters, BEA Systems, Inc., Hewlett Packard, and IBM Corporation. To learn about the new IDEAlliance TechDoc Community of Practice visit http://www.tech-doc.org. This activity is sponsored by Antenna House, Arbortext, Architag, Astoria, Data Conversion Laboratories, Empolis, Exegenix and XyEnterprise. The full XML 2003 schedule is available online. Opportunities to sponsor or exhibit at XML 2003 are still available... IDEAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance) is a not-for-profit membership organization. Its mission is to advance user-driven, cross-industry solutions for all publishing and content-related processes by developing standards, fostering business alliances, and identifying best practices. IDEAlliance has been a leader in information technology since 1966 (founded as Graphic Communications Association) having fostered the development and adoption of standards such as ADIS, GRACoL, ICE, JIFFI, Mail.dat, papiNet, PRISM, PROSE XML, SPACE XML, SGML, and XML..."

• [October 14, 2003] "PureEdge Strengthens Support for XForms. XForms 1.0 Released Today as a W3C Recommendation." - "PureEdge Solutions Inc., the leader in secure, XML forms-based business process automation, congratulates the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the XForms Working Group on its release today of XForms 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. PureEdge is a founding member of the W3C's XForms Working Group. 'We're pleased to have co-authored XForms 1.0,' said Dr. John Boyer, a PureEdge Senior Product Architect and Research Scientist. 'PureEdge has played a leading role in shaping open standards based on our secure and dynamic XML forms language, XFDL.' Dr Boyer played an active role in the working group and is the author of the computation engine featured in XForms 1.0. PureEdge electronic forms are 100% native XML. XFDL, the original XML e-forms language published as a W3C Note, provides a secure and auditable equivalent to paper transactions. It binds together questions, answers, presentation format, logic, attachments and metadata in a single, signable XML file. To meet the rigorous security and functionality requirements demanded by many government, financial services and insurance organizations, PureEdge enables XML data markup, in any XML vocabulary and conforming to any XML schema, to be deployed with the key security features and rich, dynamic presentation functionality of XFDL. By transforming XFDL into a host presentation and security layer for XForms, PureEdge will be able to scale up XForms applications to any level of security anytime. With the movement of XForms to recommendation status, PureEdge will move to provide a fully XForms compliant implementation of XML model concepts already inherent in XFDL..." See: (1) "World Wide Web Consortium Releases XForms 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation"; (2) W3C XForms Implementations."

• [October 14, 2003] "Radicchio to Submit M-Commerce and Security Standards Work to the Liberty Alliance Project." - "Radicchio Ltd. and the Liberty Alliance Project announced today that Radicchio, a cross-industry initiative for secure m-commerce, will contribute all its existing work in the area of mobile data services to the Liberty Alliance for further development. The move will provide the Liberty Alliance, an organisation developing an open standard for federated network identity, further expertise in the mobile and European markets, as well as additional resources. It will also help speed development of a secure standard for authenticating and sharing identity-based data services across mobile networks around the globe. Radicchio, formed in 1999 to advance the potential of mobile e-commerce and mobile security, has worked in concert with its members, a number of partners in the mobile industry, the Liberty Alliance and regulatory and standardisation organisations like the European Commission and ETSI to develop the 'Trusted Transaction Roaming' platform. Radicchio's newly developed platform, a method for securely authenticating mobile users across different mobile networks, already utilises the Liberty Alliance Federated Identity Architecture, and will continue to be supported within the Alliance. 'During our work we quickly learned identity and authentication is key to security and mobile services,' said Stefan Engel-Flechsig, Radicchio CEO. 'Our work was becoming more identity-related and the Liberty Alliance is the natural and universal place for conversations, concepts and standards around identity to develop.' The consolidation of Radicchio's work within the Liberty Alliance will also help Radicchio's member base, many of whom are also part of the Liberty Alliance. Engel-Flechsig continued, 'There are numerous standards developments occurring simultaneously which is a strain not only on the those who must implement the standards but on the members involved in standards development as well. Because of the Alliance's strong support and our shared membership, we feel this is the best place for our work to continue.' [...] Radicchio's new Trusted Transaction Roaming platform is a concept for securely authenticating mobile users across networks for offering data services. The platform will allow service providers to be able to offer data services to other network operators' customers providing more value to their own customers and offering customers a wider choice of services without leaving their existing operator network..." General references in "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [October 13, 2003] "Westbridge Technology Establishes Web Services Management Leadership with Release of XML Message Server 3.0. Enhancements Simplify Management and Security of XML Web Services and Services-Oriented Architectures." - "Westbridge Technology today announced the release of Westbridge XML Message Server (XMS) 3.0. With XMS 3.0, Westbridge addressed customer requests in deploying XML Web Services and Services-Oriented Architectures (SOA) by building a complete end-to-end Web Services Management (WSM) solution focused on the security and management of Web Services. Westbridge XMS 3.0 includes major enhancements that provide advanced Web Services Management (WSM) capabilities. XMS 3.0 is the premier implementation of the Service Views capability. Service Views enable customers to achieve the reusability and interface control that is central to Services-Oriented Architectures. Additional capabilities include SmartParser performance improvements, auto-validation of messages, 'Getting Started' productivity wizards, integration with additional existing infrastructure, team administration enhancements and dynamic routing. 'Our product development process works in lock step with our customer's Web Services needs,' said Kerry Champion, president and founder of Westbridge Technology. 'Our customers were first concerned about securing their Web Services and leveraging their existing infrastructure for securing the special requirements of Web Services. For 2.0 we addressed many of their scalability and Web Services Management (WSM) needs and added WS-Security and SAML support. XMS 3.0 caps a year long effort in working with customers to provide leading edge WSM capabilities that leapfrog the competition.' ... Service Views has been enhanced to enable organizations to easily manage, control and improve their XML and Web Services interfaces throughout the organization saving them significant money, time and resources for development and maintenance. Service Views are virtual services composed from one or many different services that can be 'mixed and matched and modified' according to the administrator. Service Views serve as the logical control point for security, interoperability, monitoring and business rule enforcement. Service Views are easy-to-create and highly flexible, enabling administrators to instantly 'upgrade' any web service to be standards compliant and interoperable with any Service Consumer. For instance, an XML interface can be upgraded to be SOAP interface and be able to talk to SOAP clients. Furthermore, any interface, including legacy services, can be instantly upgraded to be compliant with WS-Security or SAML, XML Encryption, XML Signature, JMS, HTTPS, as well as a number of other standards. No coding or integration is required saving developers' time and resources and insulating companies from changing standards... Westbridge XMS 3.0 also introduces SmartParser, a series of performance improvements that provide over 10x improvement for some XML intensive operations. 'It's well known that XML can be verbose, so we have made a number of significant improvements to intelligently and efficiently handle the message stream,' said Dr. Matthew Fuchs, Member of Technical Staff at Westbridge and one of the original members of the XML and XML Schema SIGs at W3C. Such patent-pending improvements are related to handling XML in stream format, parsing XML intelligently according to the particular rules required and caching. Westbridge provides 'software acceleration' that work with optional hardware acceleration products for very high performance and scalability..."

• [October 10, 2003] "IBM and Cisco Unveil Innovative Approach Toward a Self-Healing Infrastructure. Companies Collaborate on Technologies and Standards to Address IT Complexity." - "IBM and Cisco today announced a set of open software technologies designed to increase the end-to-end intelligence and responsiveness of the global IT infrastructure -- representing a major advancement in the development of "self-healing" computing systems and networks. IBM and Cisco are working on a set of proposed technologies and standards creating a common language to detect, log and resolve system problems. The two companies will further outline this initiative next week at IBM's annual CIO conference in San Diego, CA. IBM plans to start integrating these new autonomic technologies into its entire portfolio of software, storage and server hardware products immediately. In the second phase of this initiative, Cisco intends to integrate these technologies into its products and services. Together the system and network enhancements will help to enable a self-healing enterprise infrastructure. Pioneered within both companies development labs, the new problem determination technologies are envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data across the IT enterprise. These new technologies lay the foundation for systems and networks to detect, analyze, correlate, and resolve IT problems and automatically diagnose the root cause of a problem in complex systems. Customer data centers have a large set of products with diverse and often proprietary instrumentation, which makes end-to-end analysis difficult or impossible. Adapting an architected, standards-based design results in an infrastructure that helps enable delivery of end-to-end problem determination and problem remediation... The new technologies are part of the companies' commitment to develop and drive open standards. IBM and Cisco are working across the industry to develop an open standards approach. IBM has submitted a Common Base Event (CBE) format, which is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data via web services, to the OASIS Standards Body... Once problem determination tools and processes are implemented, enterprises have the ability to diagnose problems more quickly, and often before they happen, reducing downtime and the associated revenue losses. Building and implementing networked self-healing systems into the enterprise environment is a gradual one and IBM has already begun helping the industry by developing a common approach and terminology to architecting autonomic computing systems. In April IBM introduced the autonomic computing blueprint, which is based on open standards and is designed around developing self-managing systems that use intelligent control loops to collect information from the system, make decisions and then adjust the system as necessary. IBM is also working with the business partner community, providing ISVs with the latest technologies as well as supporting them in bringing new applications to market with these latest capabilities, all built around open standards. One of the factors contributing to the complexity in problem determination can be attributed to the multitude of ways that different parts of a system report events, conditions, errors, and alerts. Today, even simple e-business solutions may contain as many as 25 to 40 logging mechanisms. These log files contain a variety of content formats because systems are built using disparate pieces and parts, often with products from multiple vendors. Technology developed by the IBM Research Division has been crucial to overcoming these difficulties by providing a way to automatically learn the format of log files, thereby reducing the time required to process and develop interfaces to new log data (often from days to hours)..." For information on Common Base Event (CBE) format, see References and Additional Information in the IBM/Cisco press release.

• [October 07, 2003] "OASIS Members Collaborate on Composite Application Framework for Web Services. Arjuna Technologies, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cyclone Commerce, Fujitsu, IONA, Oracle, SeeBeyond, Sun Microsystems, Yellow Dragon, and Others Work to Define Transactional Coordination Specifications." - "Members of the OASIS international standards consortium announced plans to collaborate on a generic, open framework for applications composed of Web services used in combination. The OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) Technical Committee will define a set of royalty-free, interoperable, modular specifications that will enable the development of composite applications, ranging from simple to complex combinations of Web services and encompassing a useful range of transaction and coordination requirements. 'A serious problem remaining in Web services standardization is transactional coordination,' explained Mark Little of Arjuna Technologies, convener of the OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee. 'Web services combined in composite applications require interoperable mechanisms to set the boundaries of an activity (such as start/end, or success/failure), to create, access, and manage context information and to inform participants of changes to an activity.' 'We expect WS-CAF specifications will become the building blocks for other Web services standards,' said Martin Chapman of Oracle Corporation, proposed co-chair of the OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee. 'That's why we're taking an incremental, multi-protocol approach, creating a modular stack of specifications. Instead of mandating a single protocol, we want to offer users the option to implement portions of WS-CAF based on their needs.' The OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee intends to accept as input the WS-Context, WS-Coordination Framework, and WS-Transaction Management specifications published by Arjuna, Fujitsu, IONA, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. Other contributions are welcome on an equal basis. 'Composability is a critical aspect of Web services,' added Eric Newcomer of IONA, proposed co-chair of the OASIS WS-CAF Technical Committee. 'That's why WS-CAF will be designed to be non-overlapping and interoperable with other open Web Service specifications. We plan to invest in gathering requirements input and defining relationships between related specifications and WS-CAF. Above all, we want to promote convergence, consistent use, and a coherent architecture.' WS-CAF specifications will provide WSDL definitions for context, coordination, and transactions. Message formats will be specified as SOAP headers and/or body content. The new group will collaborate with other OASIS Technical Committees, such as the OASIS Business Transaction Technical Committee, the OASIS Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) Technical Committee and the OASIS Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) Technical Committee. WS-CAF developers also plan to liaise with efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including the XML Protocol, Web Service Architecture, Web Service Description, and Web Service Choreography Working Groups..." See: (1) the news story 2003-09-18 "OASIS Forms Web Services Composite Application Framework Technical Committee"; (2) "Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) for Transaction Coordination"; (3) general references in "Messaging and Transaction Coordination"

• [October 07, 2003] "CA's eTrust Admin Identity Management Solution to Support OASIS SPML. CA Demonstrates Interoperability With Emerging Web Services Standard at Recent PeopleSoft Conference." - "Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) announced [September 24, 2003] that its eTrust Admin identity management solution will support the new OASIS Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) 1.0 specification, an emerging industry standard designed to streamline and automate the provisioning of systems and Web services across organizations. eTrust Admin increases user account management security while reducing administration costs. SPML is intended to provide a standards-based approach to removing user accounts across heterogeneous systems. This common administration can significantly reduce IT workloads, help ensure compliance with security policies, and provide employees with immediate access to critical resources. Changes in human resource systems can be propagated automatically to IT applications without human intervention. CA has tested eTrust Admin's SPML capabilities with PeopleSoft's leading human resources platform, and demonstrated interoperability with SPML at the recent PeopleSoft Connect 2003 Conference in Anaheim, California. 'CA's adoption of SPML enables a flexible and portable approach to leveraging HR information when managing and enforcing identity-based security policies,' said Phil Schacter, vice president and service director at Burton Group, a leading enterprise IT research and advisory services firm. 'Standards-based identity solutions, driven by authoritative HR information, improve overall security and substantially reduce the risk of exposing valuable business systems and information assets.' SPML has been approved by the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee prior to submission to the consortium's membership at-large for voting as an OASIS Standard. As an XML-based framework, SPML allows eTrust Admin's capabilities to be extended to any enterprise system or Web service with the necessary compliant interface. 'The use of standards is essential as the number of applications and services proliferates,' said Karl Best, vice president of OASIS. 'CA's embrace of SPML is a welcome contribution to the advancement of efficient, open standards-based IT management architectures.' 'As organizations integrate business processes with their partners, they need to dynamically manage the authorization and de-authorization of access rights for users,' said Gavenraj Sodhi, CA product manager for eTrust Admin. 'By leveraging both the SPML specification and existing investments in PeopleSoft technology, eTrust Admin provides an ideal means of achieving these objectives'..." General references in "XML-Based Provisioning Services"

• [October 07, 2003] "ContentGuard Releases a Web-Based Rights Editor for MPEG REL. RightsExpress Tool to Assist Deployment of MPEG Rights Expression Language." - "ContentGuard, a leading provider of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, today launched RightsExpress, a web-based Rights Editor for MPEG REL, the forthcoming industry-standard rights expression language developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) and currently at Final Draft International Standard status in the ISO process. Using this service, a user can quickly understand the features and deployment options of MPEG REL as they explore how rights and conditions can be used in various DRM application workflows. Through RightsExpress' intuitive user interface and online guidance, technical and non-technical users can quickly experiment, model and create REL licenses relevant to their business needs. RightsExpress also provides preloaded sample licenses that can be modified by the user, further facilitating the understanding and adoption of various MPEG REL deployment options. 'As the DRM industry continues to develop, content owners and technology providers need to work together to leverage the potential of digital content delivery,' said Michael Miron, co-chairman and CEO of ContentGuard. 'The MPEG REL will be an ISO standard by the end of 2003, and in order to accelerate digital content distribution, the industry can start developing and deploying MPEG REL-based solutions today. RightsExpress builds on ContentGuard's history of contributions towards developing and promoting DRM standards. It will help the DRM industry embrace interoperable standards that promote consumer choice.' RightsExpress is available now and can be accessed [online]..." See: (1) "MPEG Rights Expression Language"; (2) "Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML)"; (3) general references in "XML and Digital Rights Management (DRM)."

• [October 6, 2003] "Microsoft Announces Steps to Address Eolas Patent Ruling. Documentation for Developers and Modest Changes in Software Will Minimize or Eliminate Impact on Consumers and Address Issues Raised by August 11 Ruling While Appeal Moves Forward." - "Microsoft Corp. today announced how it will respond to the August jury decision in the Eolas patent lawsuit. The steps include modest changes to Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer as well as measures that Web developers and others who use Internet Explorer technology can take to ameliorate or eliminate the impact of the ruling. Microsoft is providing full documentation for these changes to help guide Web developers and other developers that use its Internet Explorer technology to create the best possible user experience. Other companies providing specialized documentation related to this change are listed on the Web site. 'This ruling affects more than just Microsoft; it affects a broad array of partners and customers -- including companies that many would view as competitors,' said Michael Wallent, general manager of the Windows Client Platform at Microsoft. 'Microsoft has been very proactive in reaching out to this group to develop steps that will reduce or eliminate the ruling's impact on consumers and other companies, even as we appeal it.' 'Microsoft and Macromedia have worked together for years to deliver great Web experiences,' said Norm Meyrowitz, president of products, Macromedia. 'Together, we have developed a straightforward solution that should result in little impact for our mutual customers.' Eolas Technologies Inc. is the exclusive licensee of a patent owned by the University of California. In the case, Eolas asserted that the patent covered one specific mechanism used by Web page authors to embed and automatically invoke certain interactive programs. Although Microsoft asserted that the patent was invalid due to pre-existing inventions, the court refused to let the jury consider the prior art. The jury rendered its verdict on August 11, 2003. The parties are still in the process of submitting their post-trial motions and briefs. The final judgment has not yet been entered. The solution developed by Microsoft has two main parts: (1) First, Microsoft will make minor changes to Internet Explorer's handling of some Web pages that use ActiveX Controls, such as Macromedia Flash, Apple QuickTime, RealNetworks RealOne, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Sun Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft Windows Media Player. It is currently anticipated that this change will be deployed by early next year. If Web developers have not updated their Web pages using the techniques suggested by Microsoft and others, users may see a simple dialog box before the browser loads the ActiveX Control. (2) Second, Microsoft and other industry partners are working to provide documentation for Web developers that describe how to author Web pages so the dialog box would not be necessary..." See: (1) "W3C Opens Public Discussion Forum on US Patent 5,838,906 and Eolas v. Microsoft"; (2) general references in "Patents and Open Standards."

• [October 6, 2003] "Sybase Announces Availability of Latest Version of Its Enterprise-Class RDBMS. Sybase ASE 12.5.1 Demonstrates Lower Total Cost of Development and Operations on Both Unix and Linux Platform." - "Sybase, Inc., a leading enterprise infrastructure and integration company, today announced the availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 12.5.1, the latest release of the company's enterprise-class relational database management system (RDBMS). Sybase ASE has established itself as one of the most cost-effective data management platforms for business-critical computing, and builds on that reputation with the introduction of key enhancements in version 12.5.1 to further drive down total cost of ownership and operations. Key new features are designed to make ASE even more cost-effective and easier to use through self-management capabilities, enhanced system performance and advanced Web services and XML support. ASE 12.5.1 remains a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) leader. According to The Standish Group, the life-cycle cost of RDBMS applications running on ASE, is on average more than 15 percent lower than the equivalent offerings from Oracle. Sybase is committed to addressing current business problems in data management through comprehensive low-cost solutions that offer the best performance with the economical use of resources - as demonstrated by announcements earlier this year on record-breaking Linux performance, a partnership with TIBCO, and TPC-H benchmarking tests for Sybase IQ 12.5... 'We've used both Sybase and Oracle in building applications for our customers but prefer Sybase ASE because of its ease-of-use,' said Chris Young, president, Cascadia Software, a Seattle-based technology consulting firm. 'It is dramatically easier for us to develop systems using Sybase ASE, and with ASE 12.5.1 we are very much looking forward to taking advantage of the new performance and development features, including the job scheduler, and complete XML support.' 'The scalability and high-performance of ASE 12.5.1 allows our customers to build, deploy and manage database applications on the most cost-effective platforms -- including Linux on Intel, Windows and UNIX,' said Dr. Raj Nathan, senior vice president and general manager, Sybase Infrastructure Platform Group. 'This release demonstrates our continued commitment to data management solutions that offer the best performance with the best use of resources - both systems and people. It builds on announcements earlier this year on record-breaking Linux performance, the real-time database partnership with TIBCO, TPC-H benchmarking tests for our highly-scalable analytical engine, Sybase IQ 12.5, as well as our leadership in mobile data management solutions.' New capabilities in this RDBMS release enable customers using Sybase ASE 12.5.1 to affordably close today's 'Operational Gap' -- the gap created between the need to scale up to handle exponential growth in data volume/complexity, and the need to control or reduce the cost of data management -- including people, systems and applications..."

• [October 01, 2003] "OpenOffice.org Announces Release 1.1. Open Source, Cross Platform Office Productivity Suite for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X X11." - "OpenOffice.org is proud to announce the immediate availability for download of the new version of the award-winning office suite, OpenOffice.org 1.1, for Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Linux (x86 & PowerPC), and Solaris Operating System (SPARC platform edition) in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean and Japanese. The suite comes complete with word-processor, spreadsheet, presentation and various other components and provides a revolutionary open, future-proof XML file format. The new release introduces many enhancements and new features including native one-click PDF (Adobe Acrobat) export, Macromedia Flash export for presentations and drawings, faster load-time, enhanced MS Office file compatibility, accessibility support and a smoother look and feel. The suite, according to the terms of its open source licenses (LGPL and SISSL), is free for all to use, improve, modify, and to redistribute to anyone. 'The release of Version 1.1 of OpenOffice.org is a major achievement for the OpenOffice.org community,' said Curtis Sasaki, vice president of desktop solutions at Sun Microsystems, Inc. 'With the successful inaugural Openoffice.org conference earlier in the year, the energy in the community drove many corporate and individual contributors to work together with Sun to create the most stable and powerful release of the OpenOffice.org application so far, which is the core of the new StarOffice 7 Office Suite. 'New features like the native PDF export and the support for assistive technologies will accelerate the fast growing, worldwide adoption of OpenOffice.org, StarOffice as well as more secure, alternative desktop environments. We've seen community members work for days on end to create translated versions. This kind of enthusiasm helped to make OpenOffice.org one of the leading open source projects today,' adds Sasaki. Versions for Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris (x86) will be available later this year. Other platforms continue in development..." See details in the news story "OpenOffice.org Releases Free, Open Source, Cross Platform Office Productivity Suite."

Earlier Press Releases

• XML Industry News October - December 2003
• XML Industry News July - September 2003
• XML Industry News April - June 2003
• XML Industry News January - March 2003
• XML Industry News October - December 2002
• XML Industry News July - Sepember 2002
• XML Industry News April - June 2002
• XML Industry News January - March 2002
• XML Industry News October - December 2001
• XML Industry News July - September 2001
• XML Industry News April - June 2001
• XML Industry News January - March 2001
• XML Industry News October - December 2000
• XML Industry News July - September 2000
• XML Industry News April - June 2000
• XML Industry News January - March 2000
• XML Industry News July - December 1999.
• XML Industry News January - June 1999.
• A separate reference collection is available for press releases issued in 1998.