Applications Area Director(s): o Russ Hobby: rdhobby@ucdavis.edu Area Summary reported by Russ Hobby/UC Davis Area Overview The general goal of the area is to define the protocols to create an interoperable multimedia distributed computing environment for the Internet. The Internet is now a global communications resource and people want more applications than the standard Telnet, FTP and SMTP provide. At the Boston meeting there were demonstrations of how video and audio could be carried between workstations over the Internet today. The Teleconferencing Architecture BOF discussed what is necessary to create a multi-workstation multimedia conference environment. With the greater international interest in the IETF there is a desire to be able to extend the ``face-to-face'' meetings over the network around the world. Another interest that generated several BOFs was information storage and retrieval over the Internet. There is a growing amount of information available over the network, but how does one locate and retrieve it? Email Requirements BOF (MAILREQ) The defined protocols (SMTP, RFC 822, MIME, ...) do not begin to address the complexity of the email environment of the Internet and beyond. We need a set of documents that can give ``the big picture'' and provide guidelines for implementors, operators and users. The BOF discussed problems and needs for the email world and some possible documents to address these issues. OSF Distributed Computing Environment BOF (DCE) Doug Hartman from OSF presented and overview of DCE and answered questions. DCE addresses several of the ``holes'' that we currently have in the Internet Protocols. Future work in the IETF to fill these holes may be able to use the work of OSF as a strong starting place. Remote Conferencing BOF (REMCONF) The BOF continued work to define an overall architecture to cover all aspects of remote conferencing. This included things such as session management and groupware. Separate Working Groups may be generated to work on specific protocols specified by the architecture. There was discussion on the current work on session management. This may be spawned off as a Working Group. 1 Internet Mail Extensions Working Group (SMTPEXT) The Working Group did the final review of the document that extends SMTP to allow the transport of 8-bit characters and provides some additional capabilities to improve efficiency, especially when very large files are being transmitted. Working Group has submitted the document to be a Proposed Standard. Network Database Working Group (NETDATA) Two approaches to provide SQL over TCP/IP networks were reviewed. One approach has been developed by the Working Group Chair, Daisy Shen over the past few IETF meetings. The other approach has been developed by the SQL Access Group and was presented to the IETF for the first time at the Boston meeting. The Working Group agreed that a single approach needs to be developed for standardization and would evaluate both approaches. Security work is still needed on both approaches. TELNET Working Group (TELNET) The TELNET Working Group made further progress on authentication and decided that the document should be put forth as an Experimental Protocol. Dave Borman presented an extension to remote flow control that the Group reviewed and will be submitted to be a Proposed Standard. The Working Group reviewed the Environment Option and will put it forward to become a Proposed Standard. 2