Message From the President

Welcome, Readers! This, the first newsletter from the Salutation Consortium, is our newest effort to spread the word about how the Salutation Architecture can bring new value to products and services in the office networking market. We want to hear from you, too. We'd especially like to hear your ideas for future newsletter articles.

Since this is a first issue, let me recap a bit. For the Consortium, 1997 started on a high note. We closed 1996 with a major success: our first U.S. demo at COMDEX, gathering critical acclaim from market analysts and press. The pace has not slowed since.

In January the Technical Subcommittee established a work plan to continue V2.1 development, focusing on Service Discovery in an Internet/Intranet environment, Internet Scan and Print methods, and accounting models. On the marketing front, Salutation made additional contacts with members, potential members, and the media at BTA's Los Angeles conference in February. In the UK, Salutation participated in Networks '97. And, as you can see in the Upcoming Events Box, we plan to keep up the pace.

Salutation News

IBM announces Salutation-enabled product in Japan.

IBM has introduced the industry's first commercial Salutation product to the Japanese office networking market. NetCube for NetFinity V1.0 is a system management enhancement of the NetFinity software product. Using NetCube for NetFinity, a user can use a web browser interface to control and manage Salutation-enabled devices along with SNMP devices known to NetFinity. The user can, for example, view the status of printer jobs and receive notification when a printer is out of toner or paper. NetFinity manages Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, and Novell NetWare in a multi protocol, heterogeneous environment.

Sun Joins Salutation Consortium. Sun Microsystems, Inc. has joined the Salutation Consortium and will participate in developing the specification to accommodate Internet capabilities. "Sun's expertise in Java technology, Internet Service Location, and related technologies supports the Consortium's work in network computing," said Mary Hill, managing director of the Salutation Consortium.

Cisco Joins Salutation Consortium. New member Cisco Systems, Inc. brings expertise in enterprise internetworking and experience in working with standards organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that will make the company an important addition to the Salutation team. Ed Kozel, Chief Technical Officer of Cisco Systems, said, "Cisco supports Salutation in its efforts to make the network infrastructure easier to use and to deliver more capabilities."

Salutation Scenarios

In each issue, this section of the Salutation Newsletter will highlight potential uses for the Salutation Architecture. We aim to prod your thinking as you visualize how Salutation might benefit your business.

First we'll describe how someone might use Salutation-enabled products and services to solve a problem, then we'll take the covers off and show you how Salutation technology made the scenario possible.

Using an HPC for remote access to a desktop

Before leaving home for the office, Pat uses her handheld PC (HPC) to retrieve the day's meeting schedule from her desktop PC, where her calendar is maintained on the office network. Next, Pat scans her email in-basket for new messages marked "Urgent" and finds one from her boss, asking her to prepare a report for the meeting he called for 10:00 a.m. Pat forwards the message and its attached file to her home fax and begins drafting her report en-route to work in the car-pool.

Salutation Behind the Scenes

1. Using the modem on her HPC, Pat dials the remote access number for her desktop PC and enters her name and security PIN. The desktop PC and the HPC use Salutation protocol to exchange capabilities, providing the PC applications with information about the HPC's pen/key input options, display screen size, on-board memory, operating system, and data format. With this information, the PC can send the HPC an image of Pat's current calendar in a format that the HPC can display.

2. Although there is no preinstalled synchronization software linking these two devices, Salutation tells the PC on-the-fly whether to set up user dialogs on the HPC using graphical commands or text strings. Salutation also guides the format used to send Pat's commands to her desktop PC.

3. A Salutation protocol transaction between the desktop PC and Pats home fax machine formats the email message and attached file to take full advantage of the fax machine's photo output rendering capability.

Salutation Megatrends

The first in a series by Robert A. Pascoe, former president of the Salutation Consortium.

Remember MEGATRENDS, a 1982 best selling book by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene which posted prophecies for the decade to come? The authors described ten major shifts in social, economic, political and technological trends, with the premise that these shifts would have wide ranging effects on our lives. It might be fun to revisit the authors' premises to see if their visions have come to pass and what it has meant to our life and lifestyle today.

The ten major trend shifts described in MEGATRENDS are:

1. Industrial Society to Information Society

2. Forced Technology to HighTech/High Touch

3. National Economy to World Economy

4. Short Term to Long Term

5. Centralization to Decentralization

6. Institutional Help to Self-Help

7. Representative to Participatory Democracy

8. Hierarchies to Networking

9. North to South

10. Either/Or to Multiple Option

In this issue, let's look at the first of these trends.

1. Industrial Society to Information Society

The Trend: In 1982, Naisbitt and Aburdene recognized a shift from a manufacturing economy to an information economy. Manufacturing was no longer the mainstay of business success; access to and control of information provided the needed advantages. The key to business success was predicted to be speedy and effective use of information to solve business problems. "We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge," was the observation.

Today: This trend has certainly continued, if not mushroomed. We have more today than ever before, with more ways to get it. We have the Learning Channel, the History Channel, the Cable News Network and the Home Shopping Network. There's the Green Sheet and the Yellow Pages (in some communities there are multiple suppliers of this information source, yielding many volumes to finger-walk through). There's e-mail, voice mail, express mail, and junk mail. There's the Internet, intranet, World Wide Web, and MS/NBC. As before, there's no shortage in information. Converting it to knowledge remains the challenge.

There are new Internet offerings, such as information filters and selective news services that assist you in finding and processing only the information you desire (http://www.pointcast.com). In the months and years to come, you will be offered additional sources of information from unlikely sources. Information ports to your home will be provided by cable, phone, satellite and electric utilities -- yes, the power company (http://www.epri.com/csg/ist/overview.html) -- as technology advances provide speedy, two-way communication on all the wires that enter your home. And new services will be offered from monitoring the security of your home, to maintaining a single message center for your text, image and voice mail, through conserving energy remotely by turning off unnecessary appliances when no one is home.

You will see your cable converter box evolve to an information gateway which integrates the information entering your home from various providers and redistributes it to the information appliance you prefer (http://info.gte.com/gtel/sponsored/rg). Imagine answering your phone, reviewing a fax, checking your e-mail, and checking up on your kids playing in the neighbor's yard -- all on your TV.

Salutation technology will play a role, enabling you to 'plug and play' any new information appliances into your home network. It will provide the information suppliers you use to detect these newly networked devices and use them at their highest potential.

Product Focus

The Salutation Architecture is ready to be built into tomorrow's Internet appliances, Intranet applications, and extranet services. The Specification is complete and available without royalty, and a software toolkit is on the market to shorten development time.

That toolkit, the IBM Salutation Manager, has been revised and updated to add support for Windows 95 and Windows NT in addition to Windows 3.1 and OS/2. The Salutation Architecture itself is independent of network transport, hardware platform, and operating system software.

The IBM Salutation Manager provides developers a source code reference model for the Salutation protocols. The protocols sharply increase the interoperability of network peripherals, office machines, applications, and services. A user, for example, can broadcast a query and locate a particular network resource such as a color copier or a printer with a legal-size paper tray.

The IBM toolkit is middleware that acts as a proxy server, linking devices and applications. In so doing, it hides the complexity of Salutation protocols from the developer and makes it easy to add information-exchange features to office machines and other types of

Internet appliances.

"The IBM toolkit hides the complexity of Salutation protocols from the developer and makes it easy to add information-exchange features to office machines and other types of Internet appliances," said Mary Hill, managing director of the Consortium.

Source code for the toolkit is available to developers who want to port the Salutation Manager to other environments. Using the IBM Salutation Manager as a service broker, network devices, applications, and services can discover and utilize one another's capabilities via Salutation protocols on NetBIOS and TCP/IP. Developers can find more information about licenses for IBM's Salutation Manager by contacting Richard J. Osterman, Salutation Project Manager at IBM.

Upcoming Events

Shows:

Tokyo Business Show '97, Tokyo Japan

Dates: 5/13-16/97 (4 days)

Place: Information and Communication Related Products & System Zone

Booth number: 3-14

Objectives: Products and prototypes, which conform to the Salutation Specifications, are demonstrated at the Consortium's booth.

Other activities: Six technical seminars will be held on May 13-14, at Conference Room 609 in the Tower Building.