Efforts underway to standardize Directory Services Markup Language
 
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Any time IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and Sun-Netscape sit down at the table and agree on something - especially in the Directory Services space - it should be cause for declaring a national holiday. A meeting of these corporate minds occurred in July - but so far there's been no celebration. Keep your fingers crossed, rub your lucky rabbit's foot and maybe, just maybe, the celebration can begin.
What brought these feisty competitors together was the formation of the Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) working group. The organization hopes to standardize DSML, which could be bigger than Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
To be useful in an LDAP environment, a directory must be LDAP-enabled, something that's happening very slowly for older, legacy directory products (although most new products support LDAP natively).
DSML is a markup language (think of it as a sibling of the Web's HTML). It can be used to "read" output from an - any application - and translate the data into a standard format for use by XML (the "parent" of DSML) applications. This means that legacy directories don't need to be DSML-enabled, just that there be an API published that allows access to the data.
Bowstreet Software, also a founding member of the working group, has delivered a "first pass" of the standard, which the working group is supposed to look at, then pass on to either the XML working group XML.ORG or the standards body for the World Wide Web, W3C. According to the original press release, this should have happened by the end of August. It's now early September and it still hasn't happened. But it will, very soon, because this is important to enterprises doing business on the Web, so it's important to their vendors. We'll keep you informed on future developments.
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