(imho) Unless this TC is willing to staff and fund its own Marketing
team/effort, I think that your best approach would be to drive these
messages from the Marketing Teams within the respective specification
contributor companies (i.e., MS, IBM, SAP, BEA, et al).
Of course, you could always try to prepare proper messaging and promote that
messaging through OASIS Marketing/PR channels as well but I have always felt
that it is best to allow Marketing and PR folk to do Marketing and PR work.
This TC should concentrate on doing the best technical work that it can and
leave the marketing to others.
Joel
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Reed [mailto:]
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 8:32 AM
To:
Cc: ; ; Gary Hein; Shawn
Dickerson; Sarah Mees; Winston Bumpus
Subject: Re: [wss] Fwd: WS-Security specs make their debut
Thank you, Kelvin -
I'm relieved to hear that this was more a matter of
mistranslation of the effort than anything else. It is certainly
difficult
sometimes to make sure that reporters get and report correctly the
nuances of our work.
The episode does, however, highlight the ongoing potential for
confusion in the press and public minds over the difference between
the
work of these two now-separate initiatives. Without better
differentiation
in the press in the future I think we'd best consider more structural
solutions on the TC and OASIS part to help avoid confusion.
I'm satisfied to leave this discussion for now, but I would appreciate
it
if you wouldn't mind adding it to the agenda for our next call in early
January,
just so we can make sure we're all on the same page, and we all know
what steps we need to individually take with our respective PR
departments to keep things more clear in the future.
Again, thanks for your quick reply.
Regards,
Ed
>>> Kelvin Lawrence <> 12/20/02 09:51AM >>>
Hi Ed, thanks for the note, I think the press article you referenced
was
unfortunately very poorly worded and seems to use the phrase
"WS-Security"
in a generic sense where the phrase "security roadmap" would have been
more accurate.
As I know you are aware, IBM and Microsoft produced a Web services
security roadmap back in April, along with the roadmap, a single
concrete
specification called WS-Secuirity was also produced. WS-Security was
outlined in the roadmap as the basis for the rest of the specifications
in
the roadmap. WS-Security was consequently submitted to OASIS and the
WSS
TC was chartered.
What IBM, Microsoft,Verisign, RSA Security, BEA Systems and SAP have
done
this week is to deliver drafts of some of the other specifications
described in the roadmap. As you recall the WSS-TC did not want to
assume
the responsibility of the roadmap, and at our first F2F in September
the
charter was clarified after a lot of discussion to make it clear what
the
scope of the TC was. The roadmap itself was not submitted to the TC in
any
formal way.
So while I agree the article you pointed us all to is poorly worded,
the
WSS-TC has not undertaken any new specifications in your absence or
anything like that and the charter has not been changed. I spoke to
some
of the people who participated in the announcement of these new specs
and
they told me that it was made very clear that these were new specs
being
delivered as part of filling out the roadmap. Unfortunately this
particular journalist seems to have used some incorrect words and
confused
WS-Security with the overall roadmap. I have seen other articles this
week
that do focus on the roadmap more accurately.
Also, some of the other press articles I have seen do go on to say that
the authors of the new specifications intend to take the specifications
to
a standards body which is accurate coverage. As of today, the new
specifications are published to the respective author's web sites to
allow
people to comment on them.
I hope this clears things up a bit, and likewise best wishes for a safe
and happy holiday period to you and all of our TC members.
Cheers
Kelvin
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