What's cool for Industry Standards groups (retail, finance, manufacturing, apparel, utility services, ...), who typically work in their own process domains and with their own communities, is that they are all going to be on a common technical foundation for a common internet business 'dialtone'. The Web Services workshops are working at full effort, specs are coming through, all the major vendors are not only participating but also publicly taking firm postions of support from the CEO level down. By the time all the WS specs get out of workshops, which I blogged on earlier, there's going to be a good quality of standard spec with proven interop between the major market vendors before everyone can use these specs royalty free common use.

Just a short update message for those tracking the latest on the Web Services spec developments - BEA, CA, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and TIBCO just published an update to the WS-Eventing specification; first released in January 2004. 

You can see the new formal document at http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnglobspec/html/ws-eventing.asp or for and easier to read Dummies Guide to WS-Eventing check out http://blogs.msdn.com/bwill/archive/2004/02/10/70964.aspx 

The updated WS-Eventing spec has new industry feedback out of feedback and interoperability Web Service workshops.  With the new enhancements, higher level specifications such as WS-Notifications that layer on top of WS-Eventing should improve their prospects for syntactical interop for customers.