Feedback Session
Itinerary:
The slides are available here.
The Plenary Feedback Session was introduced by Mike Lambert who
commented that, from previous conference feedback including Webcast
traffic, the Friday Report from the Forums was one of the most popular
sessions. Mike commented on the week and the experiments with
additional plenary sessions. These keynotes took place
each day. They included some notable speakers on topics relevant
to the specific day's events. Forums found that they
were pressed for time to complete their business. Mike asked
for comments so that future meetings can be planned with or without
plenary sessions and speakers as appropriate.
Mike reported on the attendance at the Conference. He showed
a graph indicating recovery from the low in October (the impact
of 9/11) and commented on the involvement with people linked up
through teleconferences. There were large numbers in the working
meetings. The ratings from the plenary feedback (Monday
and Tuesday) showed that the quality, presentation and content was
amongst the highest of recent conferences.
Mike introduced the forum directors.
Carl Bunje, Chairman of the Customer Council, introduced the vision
of the Customer Council focusing on the capabilities and process
of requirements gathering. The Council has established a life-cycle
for requirements starting with the capture of requirements from
both customers and suppliers. The Council would like to facilitate
these requirements. This involves some generalization and
understanding how The Open Group can work to find solutions to these
requirements. The last stage is to facilitate adoption
into the market place.
Carl looked at some of the requirement areas. Those nearing
completion (shown on his slides) where use of directory standards
(including LDAP), management APIs (provision of CIMON), and the
better understanding of security issues (publication of the Managers
Guide to Information Security at this Conference). He observed
that the first two requirements had come from DISA. Carl went
on to describe requirements that were a little further back in the
development line: management of PKI certificates (still
in the "catch bowl" area where members are trying to determine
precisely what the requirement is), profiling interoperability that
has been looked at through a business scenario exercise and in a
BOF session on Wednesday, and extending manageability in wireless
(the requirement is still being refined). Carl observed
that there are a number of other requirements in the requirements
journal. The Customer Council is still continuing to collect
and document requirements, gauge interest and then pursue.
There are problems with getting awareness and involvement, which
the Council hopes to solve by publishing a regular newsletter.
Chris Greenslade, Chairman of the Architecture Forum, reported
on the recent elections for the vice chair of the Forum. Hugh
Fisher (NHS) who has served us well has retired. In his place
Ian McCall (IBM), based in the UK, has been elected. A third
vice-chair will be elected to look after the interests of the Asia-Pacific
region and the person elected will be announced after due process
in a couple of weeks.
Chris commented on the very interesting and worthwhile keynote
from John Zachman, and the contribution from Fred Waskiewicz about
OMG’s Model Driven Architecture. Chris commented on the resulting
opportunity to look at the synergy between The Open Group and the
OMG architecture work which will be pursued by the two organizations
in coming weeks. Chris also introduced the IT Architecture
Tools Challenge. This challenge is being launched throughout
the industry to find tools that can support TOGAF.
The Forum members met to look at and develop the notion of an Open
Group Certified Architect. The Forum is also planning to move
TOGAF from the Technical Architecture space and into an Enterprise
Architecture space. The Forum will revisit the TRM.
It is also looking at the ALP initiative and seeing how architecture
can contribute. These activities will be advanced in the next
quarter alongside more case study work (see slide).
Joe Bergmann, Forum Director, explained the work of the Forum.
Joe said that the forum had had an exciting week with 109 people
registered for the Forum meetings.
The vision of the Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum is to create
the market place that has commonality in using standards.
The objective is to test and certify products that conform to these
standards (looking at profiles rather than individual standards).
For the Paris meeting the Forum will focus on European problems
like safety-critical requirements. Joe explained who would
be involved in building the program mentioning the role of the European
Joint Research Centre and the National Research Centre from the
Netherlands whose specific interest is safety-critical. Another
new feature started with the BOF on Thursday evening which initiated
work on military real-time. Joe listed a number of European
organizations interested in participating in this area which would
also be covered in Paris.
Joe Bergmann reported on the work of the Forum working groups (see
slides). He commented on the RT Linux discussions especially
the presentation by an IBM Intel team working on threads for real-time.
There is a strong demand for solutions in this space.
The hard real-time JAVA meeting made good progress. The two
groups involved saw possibilities for a joint endeavor for a single
specification.
Security for real-time embedded systems saw a good discussion with
two vendor presentations and a commitment to work together towards
a single solution. There was also a commitment towards a Protection
Profile.
The Forum is looking forward to the publication of their white
paper on Safety-Critical Issues.
Dean Richardson, Chair of the EMA Forum, gave the report.
He was able to announce a successful demonstration of the EMA Secure
Messaging Challenge. It worked well with real-time queries
being sent to and from Germany. There is more work to do with
a toolkit related to the Challenge due for publication in February.
The EMA Forum members participated in the sessions on Identity
Management.
The Forum having completed the Messaging Challenge, the next step
is to publish the test results, the toolkit, conduct workshops to
help people install secure messaging and to look at a certification
program. The Forum plans to liaise with other Messaging Consortia
on the subject of the EMA Challenge. Dean said that he was
shortly going to Japan to address interested parties.
Finally Dean mentioned the regular issue of the EMA Forum newsletter
- the Message - which is available for download from the EMA Forum
website at http://www.ema.org.
Steve Jenkins, Chair of the Security Forum, gave an update on the
work of the Forum. Steve said the Forum had another
good meeting. The members attended and learnt from the EMA
Challenge, commenting on the synergy between this and the work of
the Security Forum. He complimented the EMA Forum members
on the successful conclusion to the Challenge.
The Forum reviewed the Customer Council requirement for the Managers
Guide to Information Security (MGIS), PKI manageability, and the
High-Level API.
The Forum co-sponsored the Indentity Management sessions and contributed
a speaker. The outcome from the sessions will be followed
up in teleconferences of security forum members.
The Forum has a draft for a guide on Data Privacy, on schedule
for publication. There was discussion of other guides.
The forum worked on the patterns guide getting into deep discussion
- there was a break through. The joint session with the Real-time
and Embedded Systems Forum went well with some positive results
and actions.
Steve commented on two new opportunities. The SIMC (Security
Industries Middleware Council) is having a session on identity management
in February and the Security Forum is looking at ways to work with
SIMC. Steve said that he had just been re-appointed
to a NASA initiative - an oversight committee on security - and
he hoped to bring in the Security Forum to the NASA work and vice-versa.
Chris Harding, Forum Director, introduced the work of the DIF which
had a busy week.
Work started on Sunday with a seminar given by Alexis Bor, Vice
Chair, on "Enterprise Directories Preparing for the Next Generation".
This was well received. The event may be repeated at future
conferences.
Chris mentioned the open meeting on Identity Management, a joint
meeting between the DIF, EMA, Security and MM Forums, as well
as the EEMA. This was an excellent day with the scene being
set by our keynote speaker, Jamie Lewis, Burton Group who told us
about the emergence of a more loosely coupled infrastructure to
support identity management and access control. Chris reminded
us of the various presentations through the day: Jason Polli
of Memorial Care told us about the importance of identity management
in the field of health care, Vance Heron of NASA JPL talked about
role-based access control to information services by the organization,
Dean Richardson, Boeing, talked about the problems of managing relationships
with identities in other business partners which led to the EMA
Secure Messaging Challenge, Ed Harrington, NEXOR, talked about the
problems associated with the mobile workforce. These presentations
came from an organizational viewpoint. The alternate viewpoint
was provided by Peter Backman of EEMA who talked about the
rights of the individual. There was a description of PASSPORT
as well as a presentation about the Liberty Alliance.
Chris explained that this material will be incorporated into the
business scenario being developed for Identity Management.
The Forum learnt that existing systems such as Passport or Liberty
Alliance will have to change. The question is can we
develop a global framework for identity management in which the
communities an individual belongs to can operate and co-operate
effectively while maintaining the rights of the individual to privacy,
to dignity and to be in control of his or her destiny. That
is the question and the challenge.
The DIF Forum ran a members meeting. Members reviewed the
work program with eight working groups. Following the review
there will be four working groups, each with an active program and
an active chair, ready to carry work forward. There were reports
on IETF, X500, and DSML activities. Members considered enhancements
to the LDAP 2000 and Works with LDAP 2000 open brand programs.
The key developments (see slide) include a Plugfest in February,
a two day LDAP Developers Conference associated with the Conference
in Paris, completion of the Identity Management Business Scenario
as well as the Directory and Mobile Business Scenario. The
MMF and DIF hope to issue a challenge. The Forum will also
issue the next generation of the LDAP 2000 product standard.
Access control is seen as a key area for development.
Finally, Chris commented that marketing and promotion of directory
will be a major effort in the coming months.
Gregory Gorman, Forum Director, introduced the work of the MMF.
The forum members took part in the Indentity Management Session
on Wednesday. On Thursday members had two open sessions.
The first was a set of presentations. The second was a discussion
on the way forward for the MMF and the next action steps, in view
of the fact that in May 2002 the MMF will be three years old.
There were two presentations from end users concerning the market
place. Richard Paine from Boeing presented PeerNet2 (connectivity
within Boeing for advanced mobility) and also he talked about a
number of projects within Boeing concerned with seamless mobility,
voice over IP, etc. Second, there was a presentation concerning
a joint venture project of Lufthansa and Seimens Business Services
Group concerned with building airport IT systems. This covered
their initial requirements for the wireless space referencing 802.11b
as the transport mechanism. There was a good deal of useful
discussion. Following these presentations, several vendors
presented solutions that they have brought to the market place.
Roger Mizumori presented on the touch stone paper that the MMF has
been working on. There were also presentations about the MMF's
Utility and Transport Logistics Workshops.
Andrea Westerinen from CISCO, vice president of technology of the
DMTF, gave a presentation on the Directory Enabled Network and was
excited by the idea of working with the MMF.
The forum members went through recommendations for the way forward.
They supported the work on verticals. A discussion with the
DIF members on the business scenario will lead to completion and
publication of the business scenario on the corporate mobile workforce
for Paris. The members agreed in principle to do a directory
challenge to create a pilot for corporate wireless mobility in the
July timeframe. The Forum will also complete the framework
for infrastructure services to support wireless-enabled applications
covering network, directory, security and management.
There was an animated discussion about the possibility of an open
API for sessions management, and discussion will continue.
There was further discussions in view of the directory challenge
on when a further pilot could be accomplished.
Martin Kirk, Forum Director, introduced the work of the Forum.
Martin summarized the work over the last few days mentioning the
joint session with the QoS Taskforce exploring common interests.
The Forum members want to produce a Guide on Manageability similar
to that on Security and will work on this during the next Conference
in Paris. The MMF are looking to work with the Real-time and
Embedded Systems Forum in the July timeframe.
The Forum members plan to work on application management starting
in July. They also will pick up with DMTF in the October timeframe.
Pegasus has been progressed to the point where it will be taken
into the market in "commercial" products.
The timetable for this has been set with a functionality code freeze,
concentrating on de-bugging and improved performance, ready to role
out in at least 3 vendors' products.
Other work includes work on AIC followed by Software License Development.
Collaboration with DMTF includes work with their "Fusion"
Plugfest and in October collocate with the DTMF developers conference.
Jean Hammond, Chair of the Taskforce, introduced
the vision of the QoS Taskforce: To allow business managers to have
control over the levels of service they offer and provide to their
customers, through a standard based approach to end-to-end QoS.
At the joint session with the Enterprise
Management Forum, presentations included policy views as looked
at within the DMTF, IETF, and the TMF. Policy perspectives were
provided by Andrea Westerinen and Ken Roberts from Cisco, and Jon
Saperia, from JDS Consulting. Carl Bunje, from The Boeing company
led discussion on the importance of mapping and extending customers’
operational QoS requirements to insure policy mapping and guarantees
that extend across all QoS domains: enterprise, networks, and remote
services. There was also a very interesting presentation from Peter
Sevcik, from NetForcaster on performance measurements of applications
and networks. There were also several endorsement presentations
on CIM/WBEM technology and The Open Group’s Open source implementation
of that technology.
There was a joint session with the Real-time
and Embedded Systems Forum, that addressed QoS from a mission critical
applications perspective, emphasizing the importance of monitoring
and controlling QoS parameters as they apply to Real-Time environments.
Dave Lounsbury, VP of Advanced Research at The Open Group, provided
an overview of their past, current and proposed future work in the
QoS and Real-Time space. Following that was a Panel discussion on
QoS in Mission Critical Applications. The Panel was moderated by
Dr Art Robinson, from S/TDC with panel participation from: Doug
Jensen from The Mitre Corporation, Mark Gerhardt from TimeSys, and
David Lounsbury from The Open Group.
The QoS members reviewed the QoS Standards
Information Base, a repository with entries for major QoS industry
standards, their status, and associated URLs. The Task Force plans
to provide further assessment of those standards related to market
adoption and interoperability.
The QoS Roadmap includes the standards assessment,
and preparation of white papers on QoS as it relates to: applications
and computing services, networking and transport, architecture and
policy, and real-time. There will be further work on: joint real-time
and enterprise management working groups, the business scenario,
standards prioritization, and, later in the year, on certification
strategy.
Mike Lambert thanked the contributors to this session. He
explained the themes, locations and dates for the next three Open
Group Conferences (see slide). The theme for the Conference
in Paris is Managing the Mobile Workforce. The focus
will be very much on mobility with several case studies. Mike
confirmed that the meeting in Cannes was well within budget.
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