The current SIF standard had been defined many years ago and has not grown to meet the current demands of dealers, manufacturers, software vendors, or new technology. Over the years, many variations to SIF have been defined, making it very difficult for the various parties to talk to one another. Redefining the standard gives the opportunity to consolidate all the variations into one standard, incorporating advancements in technology, the needs of the dealers and manufacturers, and providing the software vendors means for improved functionality. One of the biggest benefits to the dealer is improved communications with the manufacturer.

The OFDA Technology Committee has adopted the schema development process recommended by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium.) The process is summarized as follows:

Step 1 - Working Draft. A working draft generally represents work in progress and a commitment by the Subcommittee to pursue work in a particular area. It is not expected that work at this stage is a nearly final, polished version, but a document that is suitable for review and comments. A Last Call Working Draft is a special instance of a working draft where the subcommittee has resolved all known issues and publishes the document in order to solicit public review. In order to move to the next step, Candidate Recommendation, the Subcommittee must have reached consensus.

Step 2 - Candidate Recommendation. A candidate recommendation is a stable Working Draft that the Subcommittee has proposed to the community for verification through implementation experience and feedback. This step will be completed when at least two independent implementations report successful implementation, which is confirmed by the Subcommittee.

Step 3 - Proposed Recommendation. A proposed recommendation is a candidate recommendation that has benefited from implementation experience and has been sent to the full OFDA Technology Committee for review.

Step 4 - Recommendation - A recommendation reflects consensus within the OFDA Technology Committee. The Committee considers that the ideas or technology specified by the recommendation are appropriate for widespread deployment.

Starting with the Purchase Order schema provided two main benefits. Defining the information required to communicate an order helps identify the information that will be needed for the Catalog Data schema. In addition, the Purchase Order transaction is very similar to other business transactions and provides a good starting point for the development of Order Acknowledgement, Order Changes, and Bills of Lading schemas.

The OFDAxml standards, like all standards, are not an end in themselves but a means to an end. Standards are worthless if not implemented and meaningless if not implemented in a consistent and correct manner. Through conformance testing and certification of valid implementations, the OFDA Technology Committee can provide dealers, manufacturers, software developers, and other users assurance and confidence that the conforming products behave as expected, perform functions in a known manner, and are in the correct format. The OFDA will be responsible as the Certification Authority and will base decisions to issue a Certificate of Validation on testing results and established criteria for issuing the certificates.

The OFDA Technology Committee is comprised of leading office furniture manufacturers and industry software providers under the guidance of the OFDA. The following companies have committed people and resources to the OFDAxml standards effort:

Allsteel, Inc.
The Global Group
Haworth
Herman Miller, Inc.
The HON Company
Kimball Office Group
Knoll
Steelcase, Inc.

Asset Systems, Inc.
20-20 CAP
Data One, Inc.
DDMS
ProjectMatrix
Team Systems, LLC
20-20 Technologies.

Of course this is not a totally altruistic effort. The members of the OFDA Technology Committee are creating the OFDAxml standards for their own benefit, as well as the entire office furnishings community. By nature of the schema development process the OFDA Technology Committee has adopted, the creation of all OFDAxml schema will be open to the entire office furniture industry, making the standards open, non-proprietary, and platform independent.

Long-term, the intention of the Committee is to continue to define and standardize industry specific transactions and improve communications with other industries. Short-term, the Committee plans to define standards for product catalogs for use in specification and order acknowledgements. The Committee will also be looking into the standardization of graphics as it relates to sales and specification of office furniture.