OAGi Announces agreement with Strategy and Enterprise Architecture Society

I am pleased to announce that OAGi (www.oagi.org) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Strategy & Enterprise Architecture Society (SEAS). 

SEAS is a non-profit organization that promotes an open and unbiased R&D community that shares practical experiences and debates issues to provide valuable insights in the areas of Innovation, Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Change Management.

The society also works to disseminate practical knowledge and research.  You can find SEAS on LinkedIn here and their website here.  http://www.bluelighthouse.org.

Purpose of MoU

The purpose of the MoU is to collaborate with the intention of increasing awareness of each other's organization and efforts with the purpose to increase membership and involvement in both OAGi and SEAS.

"This MOU marks a key milestone for SEAS Inc. in it mission to help organizations achieve a competitive advantage.  The partnership with OAGi exemplifies Open Innovation and solidifies our efforts in making an impact in the Strategy & Innovation, Enterprise Architecture, and Change Management space." Said Fadi Hindi, CEO of SEAS Inc.

"This is a natural fit for us and we are pleased to be a partner with SEAS Inc.", said David Connelly, CEO of OAGi.  "We are looking forward to working with a group of like-minded persons like SEAS and we look to expand OAGi's reach as well and SEAS's reach"   

Thank you all for your support and we will be making more announcements as activities roll out.

OAGIS 10.0 is Here! It is now available for download

I am pleased to announce that OAGIS 10.0 is now available for download.  As most of you know this is the result of several years and hundreds of hours of contribution by our members.

  

We started this effort with several goals, including:

• Building functional equivalence with the CIDX Chem eStandards as part of our agreement to merge in 2008. 

• Adoption of the UN/CEFACT CCTS and NDR 3.0 to increase OAGIS interoperability with other standards for our users 

• Thorough review and harminization of common objects with HR-XML 

• Review of all the content of OAGIS to update the capabilities in areas such as eCommerce, Finance, Manufacturing, CRM, etc. 

• Complete review of all OAGIS artifacts to ensure consistency through the standard 

• Complete review of the OAGIS documentation to improve the content and the Scenarios 

• Improve the Data Management capabilities through updating the Verbs and the Verb processing 

I am pleased to say we have reached all of these goals and more through the hard work of our membership.  OAGIS 10.0 is our platform for the future and it is the technology we will base our Mobile, Cloud, JSON work, along with several other planned initiatives.  

For a presentation of OAGIS 10.0 I invite you to review this presentation or go to our website to download it. Members, please remember to sign in.

Thank you to all for your tremendous efforts in completing this special effort.  I congratulate you all!

Excellent Context Specification Working Group Meeting on Tuesday

We had an excellent Context Specification Working Group on Tuesday, June 20, 2013.  The members decided to take a multi phased approach with the first phase to include a survey of experienced member’s practices and document them.

We also decided to document the reasons for and the uses of their implementation of Context.  These will go into a second document that becomes incorporated to the survey of practices.

We identified the list of experienced members and uses of OAGIS and we will begin with their stories next week.

We welcome all members to join us by writing to us here and we welcome non-members to join us as well by writing to us here.

OAGIS 10.0 Release Candidate Three is closed - GA is next step

I am pleased to announce that the OAGIS 10.0 Release Candidate Three period is now closed. Thank you to all who helped make it happen.

The next steps now are to review the feedback, and prepare the technology for shipment. The process flow from the OAGi Development Methodology is just below.

We will be working with the OAGi Community to make this happen over the summer. As we get closer to that time, more details will be announced. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Thank you for your support.

New OAGi Context Specification Kickoff Meeting

We had the kick off meeting for our new Context Specification last Tuesday, May 10 and it was a great success.  We had a good crowd and we reviewed and updated the Project Definition.

The purpose of the Working Group is to build a Specification that is a normative document on how to do Context for OAGIS and other XML message Types.  It will be a separate standard. 

This work will focus on practicality and implementability and will not require special tools or tools that have not yet been built to implement.

We will gather use cases, develop a requirements document, gather current state of the art examples, and develop the specification document.

To all who are interested, we welcome your inquiries or you can go download the Project Definition from our website here.

Our next meeting is Tuesday, June 11, at 4 PM EDT.

OAGIS 10.0 Release Candidate Three is now available for Member Review

I am very pleased to announce that OAGIS 10.0 Release Candidate Three is now available for Member Review!

AS WITH ALL OAGi RELEASE CANDIDATES, THIS RELEASE IS NOT TO BE TAKEN INTO PRODUCTION AS IT WILL CHANGE BEFORE THE GENERALLY AVAILABLE RELEASE IS COMPLETE.

This Member Review contains 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 Three also contains the HR-XML harmonization work that Steffen Fohn of ADP has been working on as well as some manufacturing enhancements.

This Public Review will run for 30 calendar days and will conclude on June 15, 2013. From there we will review the feedback and prepare for the General Availability.

Thank you in advance for participating in this Public Review. You can download the Public Review Release Candidate Three here.  We also provide links to the License and the feedback form on this page.

Please remember you must be logged as a member to participate.  Please let us know if you have a problem.

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