[announce] OASIS to Develop Web Services Standard for Remote Portals

[Carol Geyer <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

OASIS Members Form Technical Committee to Develop Web Services Standard
for Remote Portals

Bowstreet, Divine, Documentum, Epicentric, Factiva, Fujitsu, HP, IBM,
Interwoven, IONA, Oracle, Plumtree Software, Reed Elsevier, Reuters,
SilverStream Software, and Others Collaborate to Standardize Integration
of Visual, User-Facing Web Services in Portals

Boston, MA, USA; 28 January 2002 -- OASIS, the XML interoperability
consortium, today announced its members have formed the OASIS Web
Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) Technical Committee to create an XML
and Web services standard that will allow the plug-n-play of visual,
user-facing Web services with portals or other intermediary Web
applications. These WSRP services will enable businesses to provide
content or applications in a form that does not require any manual or
application-specific adaptation by consuming portals and applications.

"Once a WSRP service has been published to a public directory, portal
administrators will be able to locate and dynamically integrate it with
just a few mouse clicks," explained Thomas Schaeck of IBM, chair of the
OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "WSRP will enable distributed portal
systems where portals share portlets as visual, user-facing Web services
for integration with other portals."

WSRP will allow remote portlet Web services to be implemented in a
variety of ways, including Java/J2EE and Microsoft's .NET platform. WSRP
services will be built on standard technologies including SOAP, UDDI,
and WSDL.

"To ensure reuse and compatibility, the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee
will work closely with other OASIS Web services initiatives, especially
the OASIS Web Services Interactive Applications (WSIA) Technical
Committee," said Karl Best, director of technical operations for OASIS.
He noted that the group also plans to harmonize WSRP with existing Web
application programming models (e.g., Portals/Portlets) and the work of
the W3C (e.g., XForms, DOM, XML Events, XPath, XLink, XML Component API
task force). "A fundamental operating principal of OASIS is to enable
convergence and avoid overlap whenever possible," added Best.

Members of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee include consortium
sponsors, Bowstreet, Divine, Documentum, Epicentric, Factiva, Fujitsu,
Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Interwoven, IONA, Oracle Corp., Plumtree
Software, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, SilverStream Software, and other OASIS
members. Participation remains open to all organizations and individuals
interested in advancing Web services for remote portals. Information on
joining OASIS can be found on http://www.oasis-open.org/join.

OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment on WSRP, and
completed work will be freely available to the public without licensing
or other fees.


Industry Support for WSRP

"The WSRP initiative promises to enable Web services to be easily
consumed by portals, while promoting interoperability among all
platforms," said Brian Pearson, Web Services Architect, Bowstreet.

"Documentum sees Web services as an integral component in the evolution
of enterprise content management," said Una Kearns, XML architect for
Documentum (NASDAQ: DCTM) and member of the board of directors for
OASIS. "Standardizing the mechanism for plug-n-play integration of
user-facing Web services into portals is key to our overall vision.
This will enable developers to easily incorporate content management
capabilities in applications and deliver content through a variety of
channels--reducing the total cost and time necessary to integrate and
deploy Web and portal infrastructures. We are delighted to work with our
partners and other industry leaders, under OASIS, to further this
important area of work."

"The OASIS WSRP effort confirms our belief that standards-based, XML
integration technologies are the future of the portal market," said Ed
Anuff, chief strategy officer of Epicentric. "WSRP validates our vision
of dynamic, plug and play integration between portals and back-end
applications via portlets, and will offer significant benefits to
customers and ISVs attempting to lower the cost of portal integration
across vendor platforms."

"Fujitsu will actively participate in the OASIS WSRP Technical
Committee, as this standardization effort will promote an open standard
in the portal market, while providing a standard framework for
connecting portal server and Web services," said Mr. Mitsuhiro
Hashimoto, General Manager of Application Server Software Division,
Software Group, Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702). "Fujitsu's portal server,
INTERSTAGE PortalWorks, will support the future standard, which will
enable it to become an integration platform for Web Services from
multiple providers, beyond simply providing a front-end delivery channel
for these services."

"The ability to extend applications as Web services through a
standardized remote portal interface will simplify application delivery
and increase scalability.  The OASIS WSRP will provide a means for
portal applications to be deployed transparently to many different
vendor portals," said Michael Karasick, CTO of IBM's Pervasive Computing
Division.

"The time is ripe for defining standard interfaces for portals to make
use of Web services," said Jack Jia, CTO of Interwoven, Inc (Nasdaq:
IWOV). "WSRP will make it easier and cheaper for our customers to
migrate, manage, tag and deliver business-critical content through their
portals."

"As a long-time strong supporter of open standards, Oracle is pleased to
participate in the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee," said Marco Tilli,
Vice President of Portal and Hosted Tools at Oracle Corp. "The ability
to access remote portlets via Web Services will play an important role
in transforming the way content and applications are integrated into
portals."

"Plumtree is committed to the development of the WSRP standard in order
to help portal customers integrate new applications and services into
the portal quickly and easily, increasing the value of their software
investments," said Plumtree CEO, John Kunze. "Plumtree has been at the
forefront of Web services development long before the term became an
industry buzz word, and we hope our experience will contribute to the
creation of a standard that promotes greater interoperability between
portal technologies, in order to help the market grow."

"The work of the OASIS WSRP TC is a critical first step in defining the
ways in which Web services are exposed to the end user, accelerating the
potential for shared portlets or components and enabling a broader
channel distribution of these services," said Jeffrey Broberg, vice
president of research and development, eBusiness Solutions for
SilverStream Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSSW). "SilverStream is committed
to providing our customers with standards-based products that offer the
highest levels of choice and flexibility, and we're pleased to be
working with the OASIS WSRP TC on this project."


About OASIS
OASIS (www.oasis-open.org), a not-for-profit, global consortium, drives
the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards.
Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight,
open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite
disparate efforts. OASIS is the home for XML conformance, Web services,
security, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps and
other interoperability specifications development.

OASIS has more than 400 corporate and individual members in 100
countries around the world. OASIS and the United Nations jointly sponsor
ebXML, a global framework for e-business data exchange. OASIS operates
XML.org, a community clearinghouse for XML application schemas,
vocabularies and related documents. OASIS also hosts The XML Cover
Pages, an online reference collection for interoperable markup language
standards.


For more information:
Carol Geyer
Director of Communications
OASIS
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209