Latest version 2.1 offers advanced service discovery capabilities
HIGHLAND, UT, April 3, 2000—The Salutation Consortium , a non-profit corporation focused on providing technologies that improve information exchange among multiple and different devices, is now offering an enhanced specification for the Salutation service discovery architecture, version 2.1.
Service discovery protocols enable network devices, applications, and services to seek out and find other complementary network devices, applications, and services needed to properly complete specified tasks.
This latest version offers enhanced capabilities that include support for SLP (service location protocol) to offer service discovery beyond subnet and directory-based service discovery. SLP is the standard Internet service location protocol approved by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards committee. Salutation provides a single API (application programming interface) to access two separate service location protocols simultaneously. Additionally, version 2.1 provides a single service manager to support Salutation protocol locally and SLP on the Internet simultaneously.
The Salutation Architecture 2.1 specification is available free of charge from the Consortium website atwww.salutation.org .
The new specification maintains the Consortium’s agnostic approach to service discovery technologies. The Consortium already offers mappings to IrDA (Infrared Data Association) and Bluetooth for its Salutation-Lite architecture for smart handheld devices.
“For wireless handheld computers to really become ubiquitous, there needs to be an industry-accepted means of information exchange among the different devices offered by numerous vendors,said Robert Pascoe, president of the Salutation Consortium. “Service discovery should not be the province of a few vendors and their proprietary designs, operating systems and business models.”
Salutation Service Discovery
Salutation technology provides instantaneous and seamless connection among devices independent of operating system, hardware platform or communications protocol. This provides for a single-service discovery implementation across devices, applications and services.
The Salutation architecture offers a Find and Bind solution. It helps users to locate and detect Salutation-enabled devices, exchange functional capabilities and locate required services.
Consortium members and non-members have produced a range of implementations. Ricoh, Canon and Fuji-Xerox are shipping multi-function products. Murata and Mita are shipping fax devices. IBM has enabled Notes Domino through its NuOffice offering. XtraWorX has developed a Windows enabler, allowing locally attached devices to appear Salutation-enabled to a network. Others have developed document management offerings based on the Salutation Architecture. There are also developer toolkits available from IBM and others.
About the Salutation Consortium
The Salutation Consortium is a non-profit corporation that promotes and distributes, royalty-free, the Salutation Architecture, a service discovery and session management protocol developed by leading information technology companies. It is an open standard independent of operating system, communications protocol or hardware platform.
Member companies include America Online, Axis Communications, Canon Inc., Continental Automated Buildings Association, Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., Fujitsu Limited, Granite Systems, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hitachi, Ltd., Infrared Data Association, International Business Machines, Konica Corp., Kyocera Mita Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,Ltd., MicroBurst, Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Murata Machinery, Ltd., Oki Data Corp., Pistachio, Inc., Ricoh Company, Ltd., Seiko Epson Corp., Sharp Corporation, TRG Products, Inc., Toshiba TEC, USA Technologies, Inc., WalletWare, Inc., and Xerox Corp. Academic members include, Tamal Bose, University of Colorado; Stephen Reiss, Brown University; Tomohiro Takagi, Meiji University; Professor Wenching Liou, National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan; Dr. Roger deBry, Utah Valley State College; Golden G. Richard III , University of New Orleans; Kaspar Helldén , Linköping University in Sweden; and Heath Westover, University of Washington.