CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Peter Kirstein/UCL Minutes of the Office Document Architecture (ODA) Description of Working Group: The ODA Working Group will develop guidelines for the use of the Office Document Architecture for the exchange of Compound documents including formattable text, bit-map graphics and geometric graphics according to the ODA Standard. It will consider also Intercept Standards for other document content types it considers vital - e.g. Spreadsheets. The Working Group will define how to use both SMTP and X.400 for interchange of ODA documents. It will maintain close liaison with the SMTPEXT and osix400 Working Groups. This Working Group will review the availability of ODA implementations, in order to mount a Pilot Test-bed for processable compound document interchange. Finally, it will set up and evaluate such a Test-bed. Goals and Milestones: Mar 1991 Inaugural meeting. Jul 1991 Produce a paper stating what ODA standards or profiles still need completing. Jul 1991 Produce paper on how both SMTP and X.400 message systems should be supported. Nov 1991 Produce paper on what pilot implementations can be provided. Dec 1991 Produce paper on what scale and type of Pilot Test-bed should be organized. Mar 1992 Provide first feedback on the ODA Pilot. Ongoing Coordinate ODA Pilot. Ongoing Review and propose additional enhancements of ODA. Current Status of Implementations As a background for the discussions on Pilots, the current status of implementations was reviewed. A document on the current status had been circulated prior to the meeting; is is called ``The ODA Document Cnvertors'' [ODC. This document reviewed the status of three of the available packages: PROVIDER PACKAGE BBN/UCL SLATE/ODA Bull WORD for WINDOWS/ODA DEC DECWRITE/ODA Each of the three are now available for immediate use, and the suppliers have agree to make three copies of each available to individual organizations participating in the IETF-ODA Pilots. The status of each is discussed below: 1 BBN/UCL-SLATE/ODA There has been a Release of v1.2 of the BBN SLATE/UCL ODA software; it converts between SLATE v1.2 and ODA/ODIF Q112. The software is made available currently on SPARCstations, but is believed to be easily portable to IBM RISC 6000 machines and DEC Ultrix workstations. There is documentation for the system on the normal ietf-osi-oda infoserver. At present the system operates with the UCL PP message (v5.x or later versions), and thus can operate over SMTP (with UUencode) or X.400; later versions will work with the extensions to SMTP proposed in the XSMTP IETF Working party. It is possible to interoperate with any other SMTP mail systems which does UUencoding. It has been agreed with BBN, that they will provide for the IETF Pilot 250 copies of SLATE v1.2, and will maintain it with later releases. It is restricted to ``academic and research institutes only''; others must purchase the SLATE from BBN. The software will be updated as later releases of SLATE become available. The whole documentation will be provided by UCL - who will include the BBN SLATE documentation. The BBN portion of the software will be provided to US participants by a ``Shrink-wrapped Licence''; non-US sites will have to sign a BBN license supplied by UCL. In both cases, UCL will keep a register of copies supplied, and must furnish that to BBN. UCL will make a small handling charge for the distribution. Details of the license agreements are given in [ODC]. BULL-WORD FOR WINDOWS/ODA This software is also available to the Working Group; it will run on a DOS PC, and must be integrated by the using site with a mail system. The Bull software is designed for conversion between RTF and ODA Q112, but they use it only with WORD for WINDOWS. The software requires a PC/AT with PC-DOS or MS-DOS v 3.10 or above with at least 1 MB of EMS, hard disc and floppy. It requires also MS-WINDOWS v3.0, WORD for Windows v1 or other editor supporting RTF, and font scaling for a CRT such as ATM Adobe. The programs include Q112 <--> RTF convertors, a formatter, filter, and a browser. It also includes filters and test documents. There is appropriate documentation from Bull. The licence agreement specifies the use of up to three copies of the software on DOS systems; the usage of the softwre is restricted to R and D purposes. The licensees should provide a report on the usage. The intention is to provide the software to Universities and Public Research laboratories for evaluation, research and demonstration. The period of the agreement is initially until June 1992. Bull will distribute the software and documentation, within a month of users returning a signed license agreement to Bull. Details of the license agreement are given in [ODC]. DEC 2 This package is regarded as a Gateway product between their CDA products and OSI. The VMS release was made in April, the ULTRIX release is on Extended Field Trial (EFT). They run on all current DEC machines. Again details of the license agreement are given in [ODC] [ODC] describes also the limitations in current interworking between the three implementations. We expect that there will be available also a version of WORDPERFECT/ODA from UPC/ICL. This software has not yet been tested fully for compatibility, and its license arrangements are still under discussion. We would expect to provide further information on this software at the next IETF meeting. Interest was keen also in MAC software, and the Chair agreed to contact Apple since it was believed they also had software in some relevant state. It was agreed that in view of the imminence of so much of the software, it was important to update this list regularly. The Chair would provide an updated status for the next meeting at the next IETF. The participants in the meeting expressed an interest in having a reasonably up-to-date directory of whom they might be able to reach by ODA for the Pilot. The Chair agreed to put up a list of mailboxes on an X.500 Directory system to which all those interested had access. He will also keep a list of active users on the Infoserver. THE PILOT The document describing the implementations available was sent to the Working Group mailing list only just before the meeting. A number of people have requested one or other of the implementations available, so that there should be feedback from early use by the time of the next IETF meeting. Currently we expect to use UUencoded SMTP or X.400 for document transfer. However, in view of the excellent progress being made in the SMTPEXT Working Group, and the alpha release availability of a package from Marshall Rose, we expect also to be testing shortly with that package. NEXT MEETING It was proposed to hold the next meeting prior at the San Diego IETF meeting, during the week of March 16-20. Attendees Harald Alvestrand herald.alvestrand@delab.sintef.no Cyrus Chow cchow@ames.arc.nasa.gov Peter Kirstein kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov Ursula Sinkewicz sinkewic@decvax.dec.com Andrew Veitch aveitch@bbn.com 3