ebXML Registry and Content Management (was Re: [regrep] Meeting agendaand reminder for ebXML Registry telecon December 18th, 2003)

[Farrukh Najmi <Farrukh.Najmi@Sun.COM>]

Collins, Jeff wrote:

>Ok, so i guess i'll follow up with a few more questions:
>
>- What industry vendors have agreed to support this spec so far?
>
I assume by "support" you mean implementors of the ebXML registry (as 
opposed to users of ebXML registry)?
Until recently I used to say that ebXML Registry spec is weak on vendor 
adoption and strong on end-user adoption.
This changed last month when Adobe acquired Yellow Dragon Software to 
leverage their ebXML Registry within their eForms products. Peter, Duane 
and Matt represent Adobe on our TC and can give more details.

Sun has an implementation in open source (see my signature).

In addition there are several other implementations listed on our TC page:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=regrep

Finally, there are those that we keep discovering. At XML 2003 I 
discovered that the
Australian company MSI ( http://www.msi.com.au ) had an ebXMl Registry 
implementation.

But where we are doing even better is in actual end-user adoption and 
deployment. Again see the first link in my signature for a small example.

>- Has there been any consideration of Portal Server integration use cases with the CM API?
>
As you know Portals and CM have a close relationship with portals being 
the front end and ECM systems being the backend.

Naturally, I see a close relationship between WSRP as a portal standard 
and ebXML Registry as CM standard.
Recognizing that, we have recently formed a liaison with WSRP TC where 
Joe Chiusano and I work in the Publish/Bind/Discover SC under Alan Kropp 
of Vignette. Based on initial discussion we feel that ebXMl Registry 
brings a strong value to WSRP and portals.

>- What would a CM vendor use ebXML for today if it doesn't support versioning as defined by the CM products on the market today?  Would it be read only?
>
ebXML Registry supports tracking of versions today. It allows for 
implementation specific extensions to support the missing check 
in/checkout type functions. Until we support full versioning this aspect 
of CM would not be interoperable. Some interop is better than none in 
the interim.

>- How does ebXML interoperate with WebDAV? 
>
ebXML Registry defines an abstract API in UML and then defines normative 
bindings to SOAP, HTML and ebXML Messaging. a binding to WebDav has not 
been defined yet. If we see a demand for it we could consider it.

>Overall, are there plans for reference ECM applications?  
>
The reference application is the one that was defined in the ebXML 
Architecture as an eBusiness artifacts registry for CPP/A, BPSS and CC. 
Another reference application is Web Service publish/discovery. These 
applications are deployed at Sun and other places. I would love to see a 
WSRP publish/bind/discover use case as a reference application.

The killer application for ebXML Registry in my opinion is eForms.

>Plans for application support or integration from Portal Vendors or Apache in something like Cocoon?  
>
The freebXML Registry project under freebxml.org is where a grassroots 
group of vendor and user companies are working together on ebXML Registry.

>How would a vendor achieve benefit from committing resources to this specification?
>  
>
Like any other standards work, a vendor should only get involved if they 
feel the standard is important to their future. By getting involved they 
make sure that their customer/product needs are met within the standard 
and that they are not stuck with a lot of baggage that they do not wish 
to implement in their products.

-- 
Regards,
Farrukh

Content Enable your enterprise with the freebXML Registry:

http://ebxmlrr.sourceforge.net/presentations/freebXMLRegistryBrochure.pdf
http://ebxmlrr.sourceforge.net
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