Via Dave Winner’s Scripting News is the news that Microsoft has unveiled a new proposal called SSE, which stands for Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML.
What is it for? the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of Feeds (RSS) or outlines (OPML), enable loosely-cooperating apps. ….Interesting….just remember to look for what else is needed or missing (or proprioritary). Like security!
There is still a lot of work to do with the “one publisher and many subscribers” model of information in RSS and other microformats, but this seemd to be focus on a “many editors, many subscribers” model? (wikipeda anyone?)
Also, seeing “Optional Conflict Resolution Behavior” made me wonder if this is the standardization of Lotus Notes / Domino Replication. Here’s a article on on the nitty-gritty of replication from 1998 (R5, 2 version ago). Only time will tell. It should be “simply a matter of programing” for Domino to produce such a xml document. (Okay, shoot me now!)
First thoughts on “Why SSE” ? is to make easier ongoing intergrate applications that don’t share code or database’s, which might be within an orgraniztion (or between trusted companies).
A simple example: 2 applications which allow new “parts” to be added. They could be applications from a) 2 merged companies, b) an older legacy application and a newer application (I’ve seen parallel testing go on forever, but that another story), or 3) different departments (Sales and Manufactoing) or Regions (north america and europe) which -for other reasons – need to be different? Rather that say “new parts can only be added from app X”, this could allow for both to allowed to be used for entry. I must admit that it is hard to imagine reasonable scenarios for this to exist, which is not to say there are not of un-reasoning companies out there.
Will this approach (using the fexiblity of XML) really help the huge problem of integration? Maybe. This is still going to require a lot of working and planning, but it might help for ongoing and continuous intergation. Also, is MicroSoft looking at new way to sharing data to/from excel, a huge source of data in almost every company? Hmmm….Maybe…They do need a reason for users to upgrade, especially given the new competition in Open Office and open standard XML Office documents.
If anyone can make this work it’s Ray Ozzie. Mr Notes, and Mr Groove. Mike Arrington thinks “New companies will be built on the back of SSE“. I’ll add to this as time permits, and as I think and read more.
Russell Beattie shares his Thoughts: Everything New is Notes Again: In one way or another many of the principles of communication, synchronization and security that we’re seeing in Web 2.0 all harken back to functionality that was available in Lotus Notes over a decade ago.…and ..Regardless, this system is essentially creating a system for keeping track of field-level changes, and that’s pretty cool (and powerful).
Volker Weber is thinking similar things : Think Notes replication for RSS and OPML
also I should have directly inculded links to Ray Ozzie’s intro in his new blog, and the SSE faq
Via zdnet I see that Charlie Wood already has something in mind for SSE: RSS for lightweight Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
Jon Udell’s Dueling simplicities and his The two-way data web (writen before SSE relased to the wild) is a good read going past more than just MS vs Google (or RSS and Atom) , he looks at a bigger picture and where this is going: bringing database-like capabilities to the web.
SSE is a proposed extension. It yet to be seen if any comes of this beyond “embrace, extend and extinguish”. There is already a SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language). So how is this different, better, or good enough? Note that MicroSoft also has a Simple List Extensions Specification (SLX), which is different and a little bit easier to understand, and first proposed in may(?) 2005, and last revised in august. SSE could be applied to SLX feeds, where there are multiple authors/editor or more versioning information is needed.