OAGi News for November, 2012

Hi and welcome to our November 2012 newsletter. This is our monthly newsletter for the OAGi community. For regular updates of activities and happenings, you can follow us on Facebook here. You can also find us on LinkedIn here, and Twitter here. We ask our members and friends to "like" and follow us.

Remember, if you are not yet a member of OAGi you can review the benefits of OAGi membership here.

REMINDER - OAGi Face to Face Meetings re-scheduled for November 29 - 30

If you have not done so, we encourage you to make your reservations for our upcoming face to face meetings on November 29 and 30, 2012. The meetings are once again hosted by Oracle at their headquarters in Redwood City, California. 

The Plenary meeting will be on Thursday, November 29 and we will have Working Group Meetings on Friday, November 30. The OAGi Policy Board will also meet on Wednesday, November 28.

This is a terrific learning opportunity with the following sessions planned:

- Special joint presentation from Oracle and E2open

- OAGi Outstanding Contributor Awards

- OAGi Work on Mobile and the Cloud

- Cisco Work in the Cloud

- Special presentations and call for participation from NIST

-- Sustainability Characterization of Manufacturing Supply Chains

-- Advancing Communication of Manufacturing Information

- A Business Case for OAGIS Release 10

You can learn more and register for the meeting here.

OAGIS Release 10 Public Review One has Shipped!

The first Public Review of OAGIS Release 10 (OAGIS X) began in October. We are planning to complete that Public Review on November 13. We will then review and incorporate the feedback as it makes sense.

Public Review Two is planned to begin in early December. That version will contain the Chemical Industry content from our Gap Analysis with the Chem eStandards. That was part of our agreement with CIDX when they merged with OAGi in 2009. Public Review Two is also planned to contain the HR-XML harmonization work that Steffen Fohn of ADP has been working on as well as some manufacturing enhancements.

The Working Groups continue to meet to wrap up the technical work and we are planning a Webinar entitled "A Business Case for OAGIS X".

We encourage your participation in this exciting and important work. All OAGi members are invited to join and if you are interested please contact us here. We need all the smart people we can get.

New Manufacturing Opportunities with NIST

OAGi has been approached by two longtime contributors from NIST to propose two new interesting projects for the Manufacturing Industry. The first one is entitled "Sustainability Characterization of Manufacturing Supply Chains ". The goals of this project include developing the necessary models, methods and tools to assess and optimize total energy and material usage, and to enable OEMs to aggregate the energy and material sustainability contributions from their own manufacturing and assembly processes with those from their supply chains.

The second proposal from NIST for an OAGi activity is entitled, "Advancing Communication of Manufacturing Information". The goal of this activity is to increase the productivity of U.S. small manufacturers by enabling digital communication of manufacturing information for production and data processing through development of reference models and systematic, verifiable modeling methodology that will enable new standards for manufacturing supply chain integration.

We will have an opportunity to hear more and plan how to move forward at our Plenary Session in San Francisco on November 29.

Mobile, Cloud, JSON Initiative continues to make progress

Our Mobile, Cloud, and JSON Working Group continues to meet and make progress. The most recent work has focused on using OAGIS within a REST framework, the most popular way to code API's in the cloud and for mobile.

The team has started a Data Management Guide and a Design Guide and will focus on those documents for the foreseeable future. The Working Group has also put together a list of possible use cases as a way to help themselves and others visualize the possibilities.

We welcome you to join the Working Group so please write to us at inquiry@oagi.org.

Welcome Back to Nigel Davies
 Nigel Davies, who served as the OAGi Chair a few years ago has rejoined OAGi with his new employer, Etail Solutions (www.etailsolutions.com). Please join me in welcoming him back.