FAQ draft

["William Z Pope" <zpope@pobox.com>]

Attached is an updated draft of the FAQ text.  It is missing the
comparison statements on related work.

Regards,
=bill

William Z Pope                            Bill.Pope@Choreology.com
Choreology Ltd                          US Office: +1 603 373 0598
Director of Product Management   London Office: +44 (0)8707 369686
                                           Mobile: +1 603 502 4490
1.  What is the need for the BTP specification?

    Applications have changed from monolithic entities to composites constructs
    of distributed elements selected and called by an initiating component.
    There is a class of these distributed, composite applications that require
    more assurance and information about the outcome of the remote components
    than is available in a simple request / response model.  BTP provides the
    means to associate and coordinate the requests, responses, and outcomes
    for distributed applications elements.

    At a most simple level BTP allows a set of remote calls to be grouped
    together and the outcomes tied together.  It allows for 
    - all or nothing outcome
    - mixed outcome
    - service alternative recognition and selection
    - time qualification
    - exception reporting

2.  Who should be involved in this development?

    Transactional characteristics are a requirement for a set of internal
    and external business interactions.  These interactions are not specific
    to any application or infrastructure implementation.

    An enterprise that has or is planning to couple together application
    elements on disparate systems or with disparate protocols should be
    involved. 

    Infrastructure product vendors should be involved to ensure that the
    needs of their customers are reflected in the specification.

    Application vendors interested in providing business process management
    products or business process execution products should be involved.

    Organizations interested in ensuring the deployment of reliable,
    manageable industry-specific business processes into loosely-coupled web
    services environments.  

    Anyone with an interest in helping web services evolve from simple
    messaging to long-lived, highly complex, cross enterprise collaborative
    processes. 


3. Who will benefit from this work and how?


   Companies interested in automating and integrating their internal business
   processes or those related to interactions with their partners.   Any
   organization planning to deploy and support complex business processes
   using web services. 

   To solve real-life business problems, companies may need to invoke multiple
   web services applications inside their firewalls and across networks to
   communicate with their customers, partners, and suppliers.   The BTP
   specification allows sequencing and coordination of internal and external
   web services to accomplish business tasks. 


4. How does this work compare with related efforts at other standards organizations?

   There are a number of industry efforts related to the Business
   Transaction Protocol.  
   - OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework
   - UN/CEFACT BPSS
   - BEA/IBM/Microsoft ad hoc consortia Web Services Coordination, Web
     Services Atomic Transaction, Web Services Transaction (Business
     Activity). 

   <comparison text needed>    


5. When will this specification be completed?

   The Business Transaction Protocol 1.0 was promoted to OASIS Technical
   Committee specification on 3rd June 2002.  Outstanding errata and
   issues are to be addressed in 2003.