OAGi News for May 2013

Hi and welcome to our May 2013 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 see the benefits of OAGi membership here.

OAGi Member Spotlight

This month we are continuing the highlighting of our recent Outstanding Contributor Award winners.  This issue we are highlighting Tom Fannon from Ashland.  Tom has been instrumental in leading the transition from CIDX since 2009 and he has served in the capacity of Chair of the OAGIS Chemical Industry Council since that time.

Below you can find a summary list of his many contributions to our community.

Tom Fannon, Ashland

2009 - Present   Member of the Policy Board

2009 - Present   Chair of Chemical Industry Council

2009 - Present   Key Chemical Industry Rep for OAGIS 10

2012 - Led the Review and Approval of Chem eStandards 5.2

2011 - Led the Review and Approval of Chem eStandards 5.1

2010 - Led or participated on three Webinars

2009 - Led the transition from CIDX to a successful launch of the Chemical Council

Please join me in thanking Tom for his many contributions to the efforts of the Open Applications Group.

Our 2013 Spring Plenary Meeting a big Success!

Our Spring 2013 Plenary Meeting and Working meetings were once again hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) located in Gaithersburg, Maryland.  We met on May 2 and 3 and had excellent attendance, terrific presentations, and great discussion.  Our presentations included:   

- An update on the OAGIS Mobile, Cloud, and JSON Initiative
- Special Presentations from NIST on their new Supply Chain and Sustainability Initiatives
- A review and update on NIST sponsored feasibility study for expressing OAGIS Scenarios in BPMN format
- Review of the ADP REST API Design Guide from one of our Outstanding Contributors, Steffen Fohn
- A terrific Case study from Command Alkon, an OAGi member

- An OAGIS Release 10 Introduction and Review

This presentations will be available on our website soon.  Check for the announcement.

Thanks to all for making this meeting a great success!

New Working Groups Coming!

Four new Project Definitions were presented at our recent Plenary meeting.  They included:

1.    Context Specification – A proposal to build a new OAGi Specification for contextualizing XML messages. 

2.    Enhanced Batch Processing – A proposal to build a wrapper definition to support batching of XML messages.  It is intended that this will also be a separate Specification

3.    OAGIS Release 10 Enhanced Documentation – a proposal for a multi-phased building out of the OAGIS documentation content and the addition of tools to provide a better user experience.

4.    Advancing Computer Interpretable Communication of Manufacturing Information

These are going to be sent to the Policy Board soon and you should see the Call for Participation for each one after that.  Stay tuned!

If you are interested in joining any OAGi Working Group please write to us at inquiry@oagi.org.

Mobile, Cloud, JSON Initiative continues with a great deal of interest

The Working Group has made a decision as to the form of JSON they plan to support and will soon be working on OAGIS message examples expressed in JSON.

If you are interested in joining the Working Group please write to us at inquiry@oagi.org.

OAGIS Release 10 Public Review Three is coming soon!

We are expecting that OAGIS Release 10 Release Candidate Three will be available for download and review the week of May 13, 2013. 

This Release Candidate is expected to contain the Chemical Industry content from our Gap Analysis with the Chem eStandards.  That was part of the agreement with CIDX when they merged with OAGi in 2009.  Public Review Three 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 Group continues to meet to review and wrap up the technical work.  Once OAGIS Release 10 goes General Availability sometime this summer, we will be hosting a series of webinars that will brief participants on the features of OAGIS Release 10.

Look for the announcement of this Release Candidate next week.  Thanks to all who helped make this possible.

BPMN efforts making good progress

Denis Gagné did a terrific review of his NIST sponsored research into expressing the OAGIS Scenarios using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) at our Plenary Meeting on May 2 at NIST in Gaithersburg.

There he reviewed what BPMN is and how it is used as well as the different types of diagramming possible using it.   We used a good portion of the second day to work with Denis to resolve his questions on OAGIS and keep him moving forward.

It is not intended that BPMN will replace our current Scenarios that use UML Sequence Diagrams but will complement them.

An example of the work of an OAGIS Procure to Pay BPMN Scenario based on our UML Sequences Diagram version is just below.

Meeting Calendar for 2013

Our planned calendar for 2013 is below.  Stay tuned for the specific date and time announcements.  We are also planning a series of webinars covering topics on Chemical Industry B2B, OAGIS Release 10, and Mobile and Cloud efforts.

Policy Board Meeting - Completed	Wednesday, May 1, 2013	NIST	Gaithersburg, Maryland
Plenary and Working Groups - Completed	Thursday and Friday, May 2 -3, 2013	NIST	Gaithersburg, Maryland

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Policy Board Meeting	November 19, 2013	Oracle	Redwood Shores, CA, USA
Plenary and Working Groups	November 20 - 21, 2013	Oracle	Redwood Shores, CA, USA