23-27 April 2001, Berlin, Germany

The Vision and the Business Case for the Wireless-Enabled Enterprise was presented through presentations and a unique live scenario in which eight companies, members of the MMF, acted out a play involving various mobile devices (laptop, phone, and PDA) connected sequentially to a wireless LAN and a public network (GSM).  The scenario featured both sessions management and data synchronization to ensure continuity as the actors traveled the world. 

The Why of the Wireless-Enabled Enterprise was covered through a series of business case studies which looked at developments in vertical sectors including airlines, finance, health care, police authorities, and publishing.

The How of the Wireless-Enabled Enterprise was covered through presentations covering sessions management and other techniques used by Boeing, the role of directory, and on security issues related to the use of mobile devices; for example, as a means of authentication

The MMF Workshops provided an opportunity for delegates to study and discuss the work on the four MMF Working Groups - Session Management, Synchronization, Authentication, Authorization and Accounting, and Content Delivery.

Open Sessions on Tuesday  through Friday (April 24-27 2001) provided an Update on the Work of The Open Group, a Business Scenario Tutorial, a PKI Challenge BoF, an Architecture Briefing, three mini-conferences on Quality of Service, Real-time and Embedded Systems and Directory Interoperability, and a Feedback Plenary reviewing everything that happened during the week.   Our Customer and Supplier Councils met in joint session.  Member Only sessions included meetings of seven of our eight individual Forums: Architecture, Directory Interoperability, Enterprise Management, Mobile Management, Quality of Service, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, and Security and eCommerce.

For the first time at an Open Group Conference, we were able to Webcast many of the sessions across the Internet.  This enabled a significant number of people who could not travel to Berlin to benefit from the Conference and Member Meeting.

A report of the Plenary Feedback is available here.  Summaries, slides, and other materials are available in the full Post Meeting Documentation which is only available to Members, and to non-members who attended the Conference.

We also acknowledge the contribution from members of the Mobile Management Forum of The Open Group.

External contributors to other sessions through the week are too numerous to mention here (please see the individual reports). We extend thanks to all our speakers who gave such a breadth of information and insights in our Plenary and other Sessions.

Directory Interoperability Forum:
Works With LDAP 2000 was declared ready to go live, and the launch was planned for May 9 at Networld+Interop in Las Vegas.  The DIF will now concentrate on establishing the role of Directory in the Internet,  and working to ensure that the standards needed for Enterprise directory  interoperability are in place.  This will be achieved by developing business scenarios, prioritizing standards activities, and working with other directory standards bodies and consortia, in particular through the Global Directory Forum.

Enterprise Management Forum:
The Enterprise Management Forum held a relatively low-key meeting in Berlin, focusing on topics related to future planning and developing the Roadmap for the program. Of the three Application Management-related projects, Software License Management (XSLM) is on track to complete revision of the standard ready for formal review at the time of the July meeting. Application Management and Control (AIC) has completed revision of its standard, and the formal review should take place by the next meeting. Application Response Measurement (ARM) is currently in formal review and will be completed by mid-May. Since the last meeting in February, the Pegasus open source CIMOM project has been made publicly available, and has attracted significant interest among the community of potential users. The implementation will be functionally complete by the end of May. At this point the first draft of the interface specification will be developed.

Mobile Management Forum:
The Wireless-Enabled Enterprise Conference took place this week and consumed a lot of Forum members' time.  There was active participation in the four Working Groups on Monday afternoon with over 40 active participants. The MMF delivered its first paper, the Sessions Management Document (in a pre-publication format), and discussed the next steps.

Members of the MMF met with the Japanese delegates and planned for a meeting in Japan in September.  The situation in Japan is that they will launch 3rd generation networks this year, the first people in the world to do so. They are looking at how they can have third generation applications. Discussion amongst the group focused on the issues in Japan and how the MMF can contribute in September.

There was a discussion of the Sessions Management Document as it relates to Japan. In the AAA Working Group there was a discussion on how to take the output into the other Working Groups. In the Synchronization Group participants looked at a functional framework and synchronization needs as they apply to vertical business sectors. The Content Group looked at the differences between the needs of b-to-b and b-to-c and what it means for the future. The Content Group agreed to develop a business case showing the ROI for three areas: tourism, financial services, and information services. Gregory mentioned the first vertical sector - financial services working group meeting on 30 May with Sybase, NCR, Siemens Business Services, Pass Consulting, MMF and the MOBI Forum bringing in six banks.

Quality of Service Group:
The QoS members looked at a number of relevant standards activities, initiatives, and technologies for QoS to learn what is going on and to avoid duplication of effort.   This was followed by a discussion about 3 phases of development of the Group's work: the Definition Phase to be completed end Q2, the evaluation and decision phase to be completed Q3, and the implementation phase to start in Q4.

The Definition Phase takes account of what already exists and the work of many consortia.  The work includes capturing and prioritizing requirements and evaluating pertinent efforts of other consortia. The Group will populate a component map with existing standards efforts, interfaces, protocols., etc., and will develop a white paper.  During the Evaluation Phase the Group will consider the status, fitness for purpose, and other criteria. It will look at what is the level of applicability of the standard or activity to the customer and vendor requirements. It will also look at the level of support and market adoption for the standard.  The plan is to prepare and publish a Roadmap in Q3. The Implementation Phase follows in Q4.

Working groups have been established to cover edge technology, real-time (joint working group with Real-time), storage, customer, architecture, business, and service provider.  The action for each working group is to identify current standards, interfaces and protocols, look for gaps, identify pertinent policies/service level agreement parameters, and to populate the Component Map. The architecture of the Component Map will be evolved to ensure a better fit for each area of work. 

Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum:
It was agreed to establish a joint working group on Quality of Service. An initial work item to be tackled is to produce a canonical example or examples that will then be used to identify a set of requirements to achieve Quality of Service.  The paper produced by the profiles group on how to state conformance requirements and select profiles is progressing and we expect to complete next quarter. It was agreed to add information on the new profile 55 as an example of how to define an additional profile.  The Security Interest Group met via teleconference. It intends to output a call for information shortly. The current thinking is that  there are only a few items specific to security for real-time and embedded systems, but the group would like to validate this assertion with a baseline to identify what is missing. It is recognized that this may need to be segmented by industry type.

Looking forward, the priorities for the forum are presently as follows:  establishing a roadmap, building a test and certification framework, work on POSIX profiles test development, and to examine other opportunities. The next meeting will be held by teleconference in May.

Security and eCommerce Forum:
The Security Forum received informative presentations on privacy, PKI technology issues, and patterns in software architecture, and spent the majority of its meeting time advancing the development of its two main deliverables in 2001 - the Managers Guide to Information Security, and the Guide to Security Patterns. Excellent progress was achieved in progressing these two documents, with the expectation that the former will be concluded at the next meeting, and the latter will follow in October 2001.