CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Peter Kirstein/UCL ODA Minutes Current Status of Implementations As a background for the discussions on Pilots, the current status of implementations was reviewed. The following were known to be available, potentially, to the IETF Office Document Architecture Working Group: PROVIDER PACKAGE BBN/UCL SLATE/ODA Bull WORD for WINDOWS/ODA DEC DECWRITE/ODA UPC/ICL WORDPERFECT/ODA XEROX VIEWPOINT/ODA The status of each is discussed below: BBN/UCL-SLATE/ODA There has been a Release of v1.1 of the BBN SLATE/UCL ODA software; it converts between SLATE v1.2 and ODA/ODIF Q112. This is freely available to anyone who has a license for BBN SLATE 1.2. 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 (v5.0 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 SMTP 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. 1 Bull-Word for Windows/ODA There will be a version of this software made 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. To date there are still some slight problems with the software, but an improved version is expected by the end of August 1. If this is up to expectations, UCL expect that it should be available to the Working Group during the 4th quarter of 1991. 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 the editor, i.e., WORD for Windows v1 or other editor supporting RTF. The programs include Q112 <--> RTF convertors, a formatter, filter, and a browser. It also includes filters and test documents. There will be appropriate documentation from Bull. The license agreement is for use on a single DOS system for R and D. One should report on the usage. It for Universities and Public Research laboratories for evaluation, research and demonstration. It is initially until June 1992. UCL will distribute the software and documentation, but users will have to sign a license agreement with Bull. DEC 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. Mitre has tested the VMS release, and found some problems with one of the directions of conversion. UCL received the EFT of the ULTRIX version on the day of the IETF meeting. While there have been no discussions with DEC on how it will be made available to the IETF, this is not usually a problem for educational or research organisations. UPC/ICL The University Polytechnic of Catalonia (UPC) has offered a version of their convertor between WORDPERFECT 5.0 and ODA Q112 for evaluation by UCL. It will run under DOS and UNIX. The DOS version will leave it to the users to have the ODA files included under the users' favourite mailsystem; the UNIX version will be available both for SUN-3 and SUN-4 systems. UCL has tested one version, and expect a further version early in August. The version tested by UCL would not be suitable for release; it is expected that a suitable one will become available during the fourth quarter of 1991. The RTF-ODIF convertor comes from ICL, so that availability conditions must be agreed both with ICL and UPC. The exact terms and conditions for availability are not yet clear, but are expected to be similar to those of Bull. It is expected that UCL will distribute the software for UPC. XEROX They have confirmed the availability of their VIEWPOINT/ODA software; it runs under UNIX on SPARCstations. UCL has not been given a copy yet, and so must still evaluate it. While XEROX does have an X.400 which is integrated with their system, this requires the availability of XEROX hardware; none of the Working Group plans to test this integrated 2 system. UCL will give further information on this package when it has evaluated it. The XEROX software is a standard product. There has been no discussion yet on the terms under it will be made available to the Working Group. UCL plans to initiate such a discussion after the evaluation. UCL has made available an Autonomous Active Mailbox for testing purposes. This will allow people to send test documents by X.400 or SMTP, and to Store, Retrieve or Modify them. A brief description is given in documentation available on the infoserver at UCL. 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 both at the end of September, and for the next meeting at the next IETF. Discussion on Interests of Working Group Members in the Available Software From the discussion, it became clear that for any serious use by participants, it would be necessary to have several copies of any software in each user group. This was consistent with the current BBN policy in the way they licensed three copies of SLATE, but was possibly at variance with the individual licenses assumed by Bull. Moreover, some of the Working Group participants said that even three was quite inadequate for their purposes. After some discussion, it was agreed that we should go back to those licensing the software, and get them to agree to provide three licenses to a group as part of the IETF Working Group activity. If individual groups felt they needed more copies, then they should approach the software provider, and discuss the terms under which additional copies were provided. There was a discussion for what large-scale Pilots the facilities would be particularly useful. Various proposals were made such as specific Working Groups of the IETF, access to certain large databases, and alternate representation for RFCs. It was agreed that prior to any serious Pilots, it was necessary for Working Group members to get wider experience of the current software available - or soon to become available. This phase of activity should be called ``Experiments'' rather than ``Pilots''. It was hoped that this stage could be completed by the end of the year. The initial experimentation would be inside the Working Group, and the following volunteered their participation: 3 First Surname Organisation to be Investigated Ned Freed Innosoft DEC VMS/PMDF/DECWRITE Peter Kirstein UCL SLATE/ODA, WORD, WORDPERFECT Peter Kirstein UCL DEC-Ultrix/DECWRITE, XEROX Jim Knowles NASA-AMES DEC-Ultrix/DECWRITE, Sun 3,4, DOS, MAC David Lippke U of Texas SLATE and WORDPERFECT Carl Malamud CONS DOS-based systems Brien Wheeler MITRE DEC-Ultrix/DECWRITE, VMS, Sun 3,4, DOS, MAC Greg Vaudreuil CNRI SLATE and WORDPERFECT (later) The Chair will try to organise the availability of the Bull and UPC/ICL software for Knowles, Malamud and Wheeler; Kirstein will, of course, be getting it in any case. Kirstein will also discuss with DEC how US participation in the IETF should be handled as regards the DEC software. These original users would try to get experience prior to the next meeting. Freed would plan to organise some integration of the DEC software with his PMDF Mail product. Wheeler agreed to provide some documentation on their experience with the DEC product. Compatability with Mail Systems The ODIF is not immediately compatible with SMTP, because of the need of handling binary contents. The v1.1 of the SLATE/UCL software has provision for UUencoding the data for use with SMTP - and even with X.400 if the implementations required it. It was agreed that the first experiments would be made with this form of encoding. It was noted that the Internet Mail Extensions Working Group was adopting a different encoding of binary. It was agreed that in the next version of the software to be used by this Working Group, the coding agreed in the Internet Mail Extensions Working Group would be used. Vaudreuil agreed to put some appropriate parameters for ODA into the Internet Mail Extensions next version of the document, including Profile (currently only Q112, but eventually others also), Originating Site, Version Number, and possibly receiving site. Details would be discussed by e-mail. It was agreed that the Chair should discuss with the X.400 Working Groups both compatibility with their formats, and possible interest in usage of ODA in their Pilots. Documents Available on the Infoserver A number of documents are currently available on the Infoserver at infoserver@cs.ucl.ac.uk. The documents are accessed by standard message systems, giving a message body of the form:request: ietf-osi-oda topic: xxxx where xxxx is the name of the document required. The list of documents currently in the collection is listed in a document called INDEX. The documents are currently all in text form. Some will be made available in ODA/ODIF format shortly. Next Meeting 4 It was proposed to hold the next meeting prior at the Santa Fe IETF meeting, during the week of November 18-22. Attendees Jill Foster jill.foster@newcastle.ac.uk Ned Freed ned@innosoft.com Steve Hardcastle-Kille S.Kille@cs.ucl.ac.uk P. Allen Jensen allen@audfax.audiofax.com Peter Kirstein kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov Mark Leon leon@nsipo.arc.nasa.gov David Lippke lippke@utdallas.edu Carl Malamud carl@malamud.com John McGuthry mcguthry@gateway.mitre.org Geir Pedersen geir.pedersen@use.uio.no John Scudder jgs@merit.edu Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us Brian Wheeler wheeler@mbunix.mitre.org 5