OMA Quarterly!

2008 Volume 1

After great response to the launch of the OMA public newsletter in 2007, the OMA continues to publish a regular newsletter with updates on the ongoing work of the organization. In addition to a comprehensive list of all technical work published since the last newsletter, the content is meant to meet the needs of readers and feedback is welcome.

Intended for distribution to OMA members, external organizations that hold formal relationships with OMA, as well as OMA's contacts in the media and analyst community, this is a public newsletter. So, please pass it along to anyone you believe to be interested.

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Contents

• Dynamic Content Delivery (DCD) Introduction
• Upcoming events
• OMA Trusted Zone completes new Test Analysis Project
• Enhanced Environment Test (EET) - OMA committs to Real World Testing of Product and Service Implementations of OMA Enablers
• Work items
• New OMA Candidate Enabler Releases
• New OMA Approved Enabler Releases
• New Members

Dynamic Content Delivery (DCD) Introduction

Brian Sullivan
Chair, OMA Content Delivery Working Group
Lead Member of the Technical Team, Service Standards, AT&T

The Dynamic Content Delivery (DCD) 1.0 enabler is nearing the candidate enabler stage in OMA. The following overview will introduce you to this enabler: its goals, OMA's approach to it, and how it relates to similar technologies and other OMA enablers.

OMA initiated the DCD work item in 2005, with the goal of providing an enabler to simplify user access to content services, by providing automated delivery of personalized content direct to users' devices. In contrast to current browser-based services requiring significant effort by users to find and use content on the Web, users of DCD-enabled services can arrange automatic delivery of personalized content services, direct to their device.

With DCD, Application Developers gain by being able to easily integrate their applications with content services. By leaving automated content delivery and device-local content storage management to DCD, Developers can focus on providing content presentation and interaction to users. Further, Developers can easily extend the basic service provided by DCD with application-specific operations and metadata that are delivered transparently over DCD. This enables specialized and interactive application deployment, while leveraging the simplicity of the core content delivery functions. Overall, these capabilities should reduce application development costs and time-to-market, while still enabling application differentiation.

Content Providers and Service Providers will benefit from ability to use a variety of automated delivery methods, bearers, and controls (e.g. update scheduling) to optimize the efficiency of service delivery platforms and network traffic. DCD will enable Content Providers and Service Providers to share a variety of roles in an end-to-end service delivery environment, e.g. content sourcing, content aggregation, subscription management, and personalized/adaptive content delivery. This role flexibility enables an open services environment in which entities can tailor deployments to meet business model goals, even being able to "go it alone" if desired.

In keeping with one of its basic principles, OMA's approach to DCD reuses existing technologies and concepts where possible. In DCD's case, this includes using the concepts of current content syndication technologies, e.g. RSS/ATOM content delivery/publication, as well as being directly compatible with their specifications. DCD follows the familiar approach of defining a message/content packaging schema which is usable as an extension to RSS/ATOM. This is the same approach used by many specialized RSS/ATOM based services on the Internet. In DCD's case, its schema can also be used standalone, since it provides all the core elements needed to execute enabler operations. This allows Service Providers to integrate existing RSS/ATOM-based services, or provide new services solely via the optimized DCD schema. The approach to DCD also supports a second key principle: that as a generic content delivery enabler, it should be capable of delivering any content type. In DCD, only service/content metadata is used directly by enabler entities; the delivered content itself is opaquely packaged for delivery through the enabler. Thus DCD will be an enabler with a long useful lifetime, as new services can be developed using it as an underlying enabler, without any inter-dependency on the actual application-layer content or behaviors.

DCD is designed as a generic content delivery enabler for use directly by services and by other OMA enablers. It also can leverage other OMA enablers for creation of value-added content delivery features, e.g. delivery service personalization through OMA's enablers such as Presence, Location, XDMS, etc.

Events Calendar
OMA regularly contributes to industry events, trade shows and technical gatherings. Copies of recent presentations are available on the OMA Web site at? http://www.openmobilealliance.org/News/PastIndustryEvents.aspx .

Event organizers can also contact Bobby Fraher to invite an OMA contribution for an upcoming event.

Remaining 2008 OMA Meetings

• 22-27 June, Prague, Czech Republic
• 17-22 August, Chicago, USA
• 19-24 October, Osaka, Japan

2008 OMA TestFests

• TestFest#25: 5 -12 September, Helsinki, Finland
• TestFest#26: 14 -21 November, TBD

OMA Trusted Zone completes new Test Analysis Project

The OMA Trusted Zone, the team who manage the confidential member data and test results associated with the OMA IOP Program, have recently announced the first development of a new test analysis utility to help speed up testing at an OMA TestFest.

At TestFest 23, held in Madrid, Spain and hosted by Telefonica, participants were able to complete a newly implemented Excel-based Enabler Implementation Conformance Statement (EICS) document. For the last few months, OMA's Test Data Analyst, Martyn Adams, has been working on a conversion of the report document from a Word format to an Excel format. The new spreadsheet ensures that all entries by a submitting company can be validated and that the mandatory features of each enabler are included in the member's implementation declaration.

Prior to the conversion, each participating company had to complete the form using the Word based document, which meant that there was always the opportunity to inaccurately record or enter incorrectly the functions of the enabler they were testing. The Word document had to be checked manually. The new system ensures that the support of each Static Conformance Requirement (SCR) is checked and any errors highlighted. In addition, the system checks that all the mandatory features are supported and highlights any missing functionality. A second phase of the utility matches participants in test sessions based on the features that are supported.

During the test sessions at the TestFest, the Test Session Report (TSR) given to each team are pre-filled with the "Not Applicable" or "Do Not Test" entries already completed, depending on the functionality each implementations supports, ensuring that valuable testing session time is not wasted attempting tests that are not required or applicable. The system also allows the Trusted Zone to perform partner matching based on the level of optional features supported by each participating company.

Once the testing has been completed and returned to the Trusted Zone, the new forms provide for better reporting of results to IOP Working Group with a more honest assessment of the level of functionality supported by the participants.

"Although the system format is new, the information required from participating companies is no different" says Howard Greenwell, OMA's Director of Technical Programs. "The new format will assist the TestFest participants to have a much more productive test week and ensures the results that are passed to the IOP Working group give a much more accurate profile of the progress towards approval of the enabler".

For a complete description of OMA's testing and interoperability programs, please visit http://www.openmobilealliance.org/testfests/Overview.aspx .

Enhanced Environment Test (EET)
OMA committs to Real World Testing of Product and Service Implementations of OMA Enablers

The OMA Enhanced Environment Testing Operational Committee met for the first time during the TP Working Group meeting in Seoul in August 2007. They defined the actual implementation of the Enhanced Environment Test concept, which has now been under consideration within OMA for 9 months.
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The current objectives of the EET are: