The national hearing of B103, Parliamentary decision about mandatory open standards have ended now. U can read the answers here and there are answers from organizations, public institutions and the private sector. There is much discussion about the document-formats (ODF versus Open XML) and the FESD-standardization.

The next step is that B103 will be sent for hearing in the EU-countries, which can take more than 6 months.

I participated in a Microsoft Architecture Forum-gathering today, where there was a presentation of the open source CMS Umbraco by Kasper B. Andersen, who is one of the founders.

Umbraco is free, well documented and based on 100% .NET, but requires MS SQL Server. MS SQL Server Express Edition is free , but there are not many hosters, who supports the free edition. Umbraco don´t support mySQL yet.

The CMS have basic functionality for content handling and creation of templates with XML and XSLT. Moreover doesn´t Umbraco make any html by itself and keeps the html nice and clean – have anybody seen the html in MS SharePoint 2003 or MS FrontPage????. There should be not any limits in design and functions – U can add new functionality by XSL or by using own .NET controls (User Controls and Custom Controls) created in Visual Studio. It´s also possible to add new applications into the umbraco user interface, by using drag´n´drop controls in Visual Studio. The user/role model can also be extended to match your application and if you choose to use the central node structure in Umbraco, the application will be taking fluently with the Umbraco CMS with a few lines of code. Almost any part of the Umbraco user interface can be customized and new functionality added using the .NET language c#, VB.NET or Delphi by implementing tiny interfaces. There for should it theoretically be easy to integrate complex systems into one system (but not in the spirit of SOA…)

I think it is impressive that the four danes have created this CMS and the CMS is used for bilzonen.dk, Copenhagen Prisons and by 20.000 others (since 2002). There for is the CMS widely used commercially. We use a old version of Intrasuite and Synkron in our organization and I think the first one is very unflexible, have many limitations and not user friendly at all. We have sometimes talked about MS Sharepoint Server 07, but it is very expenssive (=one of the biggest investments by MS), requires large implementation efforts and is probaly overkilled for many organizations, maybe also for organizations like us.

On the question of how they earn their money, Kasper answered with donations and training, consulting and coaching and support if the problem can not be handled by the community.

OASIS has announced approval of two new webservice security standards. The both standards are extensions of WS-Security.

WS-SecureConversation focuses on "long-running exchanges" by adding a security context authentication model in contrast to WS-Security's focus on single messages. There for is the standard essential for when two parties are communicating with multiple rounds of secured messages back and fourth.

In order to secure communication between two parties, both must exchange security credentials (=proof or attestation of trustiness). Before that can take place though, each party needs to determine if they can trust the asserted credentials of the other. The WS-Trust can obtain and exchange security credentials, because the standard enables companies to issue, renew and validate security tokens, either directly with one another or through a trusted third party.

IBM, Microsoft and Sun have verified successful implementations of WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust.

Read more here.