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.

REMINDER: OAGIS 10.0 Public Review One ends Nov. 13

This is a reminder that the OAGIS 10.0 Public Review One ends on November 13, 2012.

OAGIS Release 10.0, is our long awaited re-engineered version of OAGIS. This release of OAGIS, when it becomes generally available, will succeed the Chem eStandards that were built by CIDX and ceded to OAGi during the merger in 2008.

We have no plans to drop prior releases of the Chem eStandards, they will continue to remain available on our website.

This Public Review does not yet contain the Chemical Industry requirements, that is planned to be added for Public Release 2, planned for early December, 2012.

OAGIS X also supports the newest UN/CEFACT Core Components Specifications, providing better rigor in the data model and also an increased ease of use.

As a Release Candidate this release is provided for 30 days in order to be reviewed by the public and for comment. This is the first of three release candidates that will be provided prior to the general release of OAGIS 10. As with all OAGi release candidates this release is NOT to be used for implementation as it will not be supported going forward.

We are planning a webinar entitled "A Business Case for OAGIS Release 10.0" as well so look for that announcement.

OAGIS Release 10 Release Candidate One:

- Content parity with OAGIS Release 9.6
- Support for UN/CEFACT Core Components 3.0
- Support for UN/CEFACT XML Naming and Design Rules (NDR) 3.0
- Support for UN/CEFACT Data Type Catalog 3.1
- Removes support for UN/CEFACT Core Components 2.1 and XML NDR 2.0
- Restructuring of the library structure
- Deletion of all deprecated items from the family of OAGIS 9.X Releases
- Single Namespace for easier use
- Support for nils on Field level content

This Public Review will run for 30 days and conclude on November 13, 2012. From there we will review the feedback and we expect to release Public Review 2 in early December, 2012, which includes the Chem eStandards gap work and the HR-XML content harmonization.

Thank you in advance for participating in this Public Review. You can learn download the Public Review Release Candidate One here.