UN/CEFACT Meetings this week in Geneva

The UN/CEFACT Forum is meeting in Geneva, Switzerland this week.  OAGi has several members participating this week, including two persons from Oracle and one person from SAP.

Jim Wilson, our Chemical Industry Council Architect, and I are participating in some of the meetings remotely.

Today it is the Context Methodology work, which is important to our OAGIS Release 10 strategy.

Converting to UN/CEFACT CCTS 3.0

We had a good meeting looking at automated ways to convert our OAGIS component libraries from CCTS 2.01 to the new UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) 3.0 format.

We are optimistic that we can do much of the work with home built tools using XSLT.  I will keep you informed as we make more progress.

For our upcoming OAGIS Release 10, we plan to support CCTS 3.0, Naming and Design Rules 3.0, and the Data Type library 3.0.  We also plan to leverage the Core Component Library (CCL) to the extent that it works for our requirements.

DHL Joins our High Tech Council

We are very pleased to have DHL join our High Tech Council. DHL has been active in open standards efforts for years, including holding leadership positions in RosettaNet.

The High Tech Council is preparing to roll out some excellent work to support logistics for the high tech industry, so the timing with DHL is excellent.

The members of the OAGi High Tech Council include: Cisco, DHL, GXS, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Their web page is here.

OAGi Website Registrations Growing

I checked our registered users yesterday afternoon and found that OAGi has added 2182 registered users from 74 countries to our website since December 2009 and we are growing at the rate of 6 to 10 new users a day.

It's fun to watch this community continue to grow and it is another reason why membership in OAGi is such a valuable thing.  It really brings you into a large community of people who are working to solve the same problems.

High Tech Council Meeting Today

The OAGi High Tech Council is meeting today.  I am very excited because this is the first meeting Chaired by our new Chair from Microsoft, Jean-Claude Monney.


Jean-Claude is the US Chief Industry Technology Strategist for the Microsoft High Tech and Automotive businesses.  He also has experience Chairing the RosettaNet Architecture and Electronic Component Boards.

European meeting registration now open

I am pleased to announce that registration for our upcoming European OAGi meeting is now open.

We will be hosted by Cisco, an OAGi Board Member, on November 1, 2010 at their facilities in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Please feel tell anyone you think may be interested, everyone is invited.

You can learn more about the location of the meeting, hotel, get directions, and register for the meeting here.

Successfully collaborating with ISA 95 Team

Our OAGIS X Working Group had a terrific joint meeting with the ISA 95 team this week.  We worked very closely with the ISA 95 team a few years ago when OAGi joined the Open O&M efforts.

The purpose was to discuss their new release of ISA 95 Part One with the intention of harmonizing the manufacturing concepts they have defined with the manufacturing concepts that OAGIS has defined.

The good news is their approach has been to make the base concepts more general, and then rely on a form of contextualization to add the detail to the concept.

That is exactly what we are working to do with our remodeling of OAGIS and building towards implementing the UN/CEFACT Context Methodology.

The two teams worked well together, and we pledged close cooperation moving forward.

OAGIS and ISA S95

As part of our OAGIS Release 10 (OAGIS X) work, the Working Group has been reviewing the terms for manufacturing concepts with the goal of harmonizing OAGIS and ISA S95.

One Working Group member has build a spreadsheet that we have reviewed, and now we plan to meet with some of the members of ISA S95 to discuss this further.

This is an important development in the harmonization of standards for manufacturing and we hope it will produce a better Open Standard for the community.

OAGIS on Schema Central

The Schema Central website has posted a nice expression of OAGIS Release 9.4.1 online on their website here.  The documentation is pretty nice as well. 

A word Release 9.4.1, we plan to be releasing OAGIS Release 9.5 within the next six months.  Release 9.5 will include a new Warranty set of BODs, support for High Tech Logistics business processes, as well as support for the Order to Cash and Procure to Pay business processes for the Metals Industry.

New Export Compliance Working Group

CDC Software, one of our Policy Board members, has proposed building a new Export Compliance BOD.

The proposed scope is to address Restricted Party Screening, License Determination and Checklist Compliance Screening Integration.

Stay tuned for the call for participation.

Software tools for OAGIS X

The OAGIS X team most recently started a study group to look at software tools they need to build for themselves to help build and deploy OAGIS X.

This includes library management, conversion of components to CCTS/NDR 3.0, and support for the UN/CEFACT Context Methodology.

We are planning to use open source and build scripts for ourselves.

OAGi News August 2010

The OAGi newsletter for August 2010 was published today.  The highlights include:

A new members only section of the OAGi website
Our OAGi Group on LinkedIn Group
New Export Compliance Working Group
OAGi Tools Strategy dicsussion for OAGIS Release 10.

You can read the entire August newsletter here.

Mozambique Registration

I was pleased to see that OAGi added a seventy fourth county to the registration list this week. Mozambique joins Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, and Egypt as our sixth African country represented.

It is always interesting to see the world wide representation of our community, and we welcome our newest nation.

OAGi Announces a new Members Only Website

We are pleased to announce that we have launched a new members only section of the OAGi website. We will be adding to it over time and we welcome your suggestions and feedback.

Some of the features include:
· An OAGi Calendar of events
· Free Software and guides that we charge for non-members
· Links to webinar recordings
· OAGi video training class
· Access to OAGi member logos
· Technical resources not available on the open website

OAGi members can just login with your userid and you will see the members area appear on the menu.

The OAGi website can be accessed at: http://www.oagi.org/

Visit our OAGi Linkedin Group

The Open Applications Group has a Linkedin Group that is growing.  There you can share with others of your same interests, including standards, interoperabilty, and B2B.


We invite you to visit us here. http://tinyurl.com/32ghe9d

Software tools for standards development

We had a good OAGIS X development meeting last Friday, discussing requirements for software tools to do a better job of building and maintaining our standards.

We don't want to spend money, and we have some really smart people involved, so I am thinking we build some tools for us, not commercial use.

We already have a BOD flattener that was a team effort with staff and members, and we are planning to use that model for this effort.