DENVER, Colo., June 7, 1999—The Salutation Consortium today previewed an open architecture for capability discovery and information sharing aimed at developers of mobile devices with limited bandwidth and battery-based power constraints. The preview took place at the Windows CE Developers Conference, which opened today.

Salutation previewed the prototype Salutation Manager Lite (SLM Lite) architecture at the conference in order to obtain feedback from WinCE developers and confirm that the prototype meets all developer requirements. “Hand held and palm-size WinCE computers with IrDA infrared communications links are a perfect environment for SLM Lite,” said Robert Pascoe, technical consultant to the consortium. “This new generation of devices needs to be able to share information with a broad range of computers and peripherals. Salutation is independent of operating systems, so SLM Lite will be portable to other versions of WinCE, Palm OS, and Java. Since Salutation has no networking protocol prerequisites, SLM Lite will support TCP/IP and Bluetooth, as well.”

The Salutation Architecture was originated by leading information technology companies who foresaw the need for an open, standard way for locating and controlling equipment across networks. Key to the process, Salutation enables a device to search for a capability (such as operating environment and display characteristics) and once a device has been located, Salutation facilitates the attachment of the proper device drivers and data transforms, allowing maximum possible use of the device and its capabilities.