Gregg Barrett

Overview:

On the technology front:

I think the Microsoft platform may be a suitable platform going forward as we are already using
InfoPath and SQL, you should look at the ETL capabilities as part of SQL Server Integration Services
(SSIS).
Further I think that BizTalk Server should also be evaluated particularly for it's capabilities in rules, the
rest of it's capabilities will also be of use, including the adapters.
The latest SQL Server Reporting and BI capabilities including the support of Hadoop also looks
promising. So we may be able to have Microsoft as the complete technology platform, which should
make life, when it comes to development, a bit easier.
Should that not serve as a sufficiently capable platform, then it should also be worth considering the
technology of:
- Adeptia
- Informatica
- Software AG, webMethods
- TIBCO
- Progress Software
All these listed platforms have strong capabilities in the middleware space, from ETL, rules, master
data management, forms and reporting.
On the standards/frameworks front:

- UBL (Universal Business Language) should be considered for use where relevant. It will be
particularly useful when it comes to things like claims procurement.
- Where UBL is relevant, RosettaNet should also be evaluated.
- The OASIS Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented Architecture is a
necessary inclusion the SOA front.
- On the business process front, Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-
BPEL) provides the necessary guidance.
- XBRL is the framework on the financial reporting front.
- Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is the critical framework covering
unstructured data.
- Schematron on the rules domain. However I have doubts about its suitability. See Oasis
CAM below.
- EDM Council is the go to point for data maturity models.
- OASIS Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) on the interoperability front for tying together
disparate systems and services.
- OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) is relevant on the Party Data (including GIS) front
- OASIS Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM) (which incorporates rules)
I have looked through pretty much all that is out there and think that the standards/frameworks that I
have outlined in the document cover all the areas of importance.
It is important to note that as the above are standards, they are freely accessible and where relevant
are either supported by technology providers or in the process of being incorporated - many of the
technology providers play a role in the development of these standards.

General

I have also included links to some software that could come in handy now and down the road.
In addition to this I have listed some new developments on the Microsoft Word front, which resembles
some of the capabilities that one would find in a contract management system - on the contract
authoring front. This could come in handy on the policy administration front and also as it relates to
XML schemas.
..
Standard: OASIS - Universal Business Language (UBL)
UBL, the Universal Business Language, is the product of an international effort to define a royalty-free
library of standard electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and invoices.
Developed in an open and accountable OASIS Technical Committee with participation from a variety
of industry data standards organizations, UBL is designed to plug directly into existing business, legal,
auditing, and records management practices, eliminating the re-keying of data in existing fax- and
paper-based supply chains and providing an entry point into electronic commerce for small and
medium-sized businesses.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl
What differentiates UBL from apparently similar efforts such as RosettaNet and OAGIS?
There are some similarities between UBL and other XML business data initiatives, but taken together,
UBL's attributes make it unique.
UBL was developed in a completely open, publicly visible, vendor-neutral, royalty-free standards
process that allows input from the entire user community -- not just big corporate players who can
afford to pay hefty consortium fees. You don't have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to work
with or talk about UBL!
Many of the currently available XML business vocabularies are optimized to support the business
requirements of specific vertical industries. UBL is designed to work across domains, making it
ideally suited to the needs of users such as governments that must impose a standard format
upon trading partners in multiple industries.
UBL is the first standard to be based on the ebXML Core Components Technical Specification
(ISO 15000-5).
UBL is also completely up-to-date with regard to schema technology and library design. The UBL
schema Naming and Design Rules, developed by a world-class group of XML schema experts,
have been widely adopted and copied by other XML definition efforts. And the component library
approach to document definition puts UBL miles ahead of older efforts in which the various
document types were defined in isolation.
To reduce the job of ecommerce standardization to manageable proportions, UBL strongly
differentiates the data standardization problem from the process standardization problem. UBL
focuses on the standardization of business data as the first step toward global ecommerce
integration, leaving the standardization of business processes to user communities and assuming
that process definition will be addressed in a separate layer of the stack. A side benefit of this
approach is to make UBL usable with the widest possible range of process definition
technologies.
To provide a bridge between traditional paper-based workflows and electronic commerce, UBL is
strongly document-centric, preserving transparency for human users and easily mapping to
processes based on the exchange of legally binding instruments. To put it another way, UBL is
focused on the "public space" between enterprises rather than the "private space" within
enterprises, and it is therefore better tuned for open-ended B2B exchanges than are schema
libraries designed for internal application integration.
To sum up, UBL does not seek to compete with any existing XML business vocabularies but rather to
meet a set of needs that are not being adequately met by any of them.

and
Standard: RosettaNet - Partner Interface Processes (PIPs)
RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) define business processes between trading partners.

PIPs fit into seven Clusters, or groups of core business processes, that represent the backbone of the
trading network. Each Cluster is broken down into Segments - cross-enterprise processes involving
more than one type of trading partner. Within each Segment are individual PIPs.
PIPs are specialized system-to-system XML-based dialogs. Each PIP specification includes a
business document with the vocabulary, and a business process with the choreography of the
message dialog.
http://www.rosettanet.org/TheStandards/RosettaNetStandards/PIPs/tabid/475/Default.aspx
.
Standard: OASIS - Reference Architecture Foundation for SOA
The OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model TC develops a reference model to
encourage the continued growth of different and specialized SOA implementations whilst preserving a
common layer of understanding about what SOA is.
This document specifies the OASIS Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA-RAF). It follows from the concepts and relationships defined in the OASIS
Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture. While it remains abstract in nature, the current
document describes the foundation upon which specific SOA concrete architectures can be built.
The focus of the SOA-RAF is on an approach to integrating business with the information technology
needed to support it. These issues are always present but are all the more important when business
integration involves crossing ownership boundaries.
The SOA-RAF follows the recommended practice of describing architecture in terms of models, views,
and viewpoints, as prescribed in the ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000 (now ISO/IEC 42010-2007) Standard. The
SOA-RAF is of value to Enterprise Architects, Business and IT Architects as well as CIOs and other
senior executives involved in strategic business and IT planning.
The SOA-RAF has three main views: the Participation in a SOA Ecosystem view which focuses on
the way that participants are part of a Service Oriented Architecture ecosystem; the Realization of a
SOA Ecosystem view which addresses the requirements for constructing a SOA-based system in a
SOA ecosystem; and the Ownership in a SOA Ecosystem view which focuses on what is meant to
own a SOA-based system.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm that has gained significant attention
within the information technology (IT) and business communities. The SOA ecosystem described in
this document occupies the area between business and IT. It is neither wholly IT nor wholly business,
but is of both worlds. Neither business nor IT completely own, govern and manage this SOA
ecosystem. Both sets of concerns must be accommodated for the SOA ecosystem to fulfill its
purposes.
The OASIS Reference Model for SOA [SOA-RM] provides a common language for understanding the
important features of SOA but does not address the issues involved in constructing, using or owning a
SOA-based system. This document focuses on these aspects of SOA.
The intended audiences of this document and expected benefits to be realized include non-
exhaustively:
- Enterprise Architects - will gain a better understanding when planning and designing
enterprise systems of the principles that underlie Service Oriented Architecture;
- Standards Architects and Analysts - will be able to better position specific specifications in
relation to each other in order to support the goals of SOA;
- Decision Makers - will be better informed as to the technology and resource implications of
commissioning and living with a SOA-based system; in particular, the implications following
from multiple ownership domains; and
- Users/Developers - will gain a better understanding of what is involved in participating in a
SOA-based system.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm
..
Standard: OASIS - Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)
When automating business processes between different organizations, it is required to specify these
processes to achieve interoperability. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is an XML-
based language for this purpose. It allows specifying business processes and business interaction
protocols. BPEL extends the Web Services model and enables it to support business transactions
and to adopt the concept of programming in the large (programming long-running asynchronous
processes).
With BPEL it is possible to link different services together into a business process using composition.
One the one hand it is an implementation language, on the other hand it can be used to describe the
interfaces of a business process, using abstract processes.
Implementing an executable business process with BPEL means defining a new Web Service by
composing already existing services. This kind of collaboration between services is also called
orchestration, where an executable business process is under control of a single endpoint. The
interface of the composite service is described as a collection of WSDL ports. Figure 2 illustrates a
Web Service implemented as a BPEL process. Inside the process a request to another service is
sent, when the acknowledgment, and finally the response to the request has been arrived, the BPEL
process comes to the end. The trigger starting the process might be a web service too. This is
indicated by the two arrows on the left-hand-side of the figure.


This language is called Web Services Business Process Execution Language (abbreviated to WS-
BPEL). Processes in WS-BPEL export and import functionality by using Web Service interfaces
exclusively.
Business processes can be described in two ways. Executable business processes model actual
behavior of a participant in a business interaction. Abstract business processes are partially specified
processes that are not intended to be executed. An Abstract Process may hide some of the required
concrete operational details. Abstract Processes serve a descriptive role, with more than one possible
use case, including observable behavior and process template. WS-BPEL is meant to be used to
model the behavior of both Executable and Abstract Processes.
WS-BPEL provides a language for the specification of Executable and Abstract business processes.
By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business
transactions. WS-BPEL defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion
of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and the business-to-business spaces.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsbpel
..............................................................................
Standard: OASIS - Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)
Unstructured information may be defined as the direct product of human communication. Examples
include natural language documents, email, speech, images and video. The UIMA specification
defines platform-independent data representations and interfaces for software components or
services called analytics, which analyze unstructured information and assign semantics to regions of
that unstructured information.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=uima
and
Unstructured Information Management applications:
Apache UIMA
Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes
of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. An example
UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or
relations, such as works-for or located-at.
UIMA enables applications to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification"
=> "language specific segmentation" => "sentence boundary detection" => "entity detection
(person/place names etc.)". Each component implements interfaces defined by the framework and
provides self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these
components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that
flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages.
UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to
very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.
Apache UIMA is an Apache-licensed open source implementation of the UIMA specification (that
specification is, in turn, being developed concurrently by a technical committee within OASIS, a
standards organization).
Here you can find:
Frameworks
Components, and
Infrastructure,
All licensed under the Apache license. The dashed-line boxes above are placeholders for possible
future additions
http://uima.apache.org/
.
Standard: OASIS - Customer Information Quality (CIQ)
The Name "Customer Information Quality" is just the operating name of the Technical Committee. The
scope of the TC is much broader than "Customer Information". This Committee concentrates on
developing global and generic industry standards for managing "Party Centric Information".
"Customer" is a type of "Party".
Customer Information Quality, is an XML Specifications for defining, representing, interoperating and
managing party information (e.g. name, address).
The word "Customer" is used as a generic term and it can be replaced by line of business specific or
industry terms (specific to the context) such as: Beneficiary, Business Entity, Citizen, Client, Contact,
Guest, Legal Entity, Organisation, Partner, Party, Patient, Prospect, Subscriber, Supplier, Service
Provider, Trust, Trustee, etc. All these types of "customer(s)" are a type of "Party".
The objective of the OASIS CIQ TC (formed in 2000) is to deliver a set of XML Specifications for
defining, representing, interoperating and managing "PARTY (Person or Organisation) CENTRIC
INFORMATION" that are truly open, vendor neutral, industry and application independent, and
importantly "Global" (ability to represent international data formats such as different types of party
names and addresses used in 241+ countries).
This is the only group in the world that is dedicated to developing Party Information Specifications that
are vendor, application, industry and technology neutral, and importantly, open and global.
The CIQ family of specifications are designed to represent party data (e.g. name and address)
independent of any culture, geographical location, application or industry at an abstract (simple
representation of data - free text format) or detailed (complex representation, i.e. breaking the data
into its atomic elements - structured format) level from a data integrity and quality perspective and
therefore, is truly a "global" (International) specification for representing party information.
CIQ Specifications enables organisations to have a unified and consistent representation and
standardization of their party data (e.g. employee, members, suppliers, partners, customers, etc) and
use it to support various application requirements in the organisation that deal with party data (e.g.
Master Data Management (MDM), Customer/Party Data Integration, Party
identification/recognition/identity management, HR, billing, sales, marketing, data quality and integrity,
e-commerce/e-business, party data exchange, postal services, customer/party views, etc). By
representing and managing party data consistently using CIQ specifications as the base scheme for
an organisation, and extending it to support specific business requirements, unique identitification,
integration, standardisation, matching, synchonization and management of quality party
information/data is possible.
OASIS CIQ Specifications play a critical role in enabling party oriented software services based on
SOA principles to exchange, interoperate and integrate party data in a consistent, standard and open
manner between IT systems/applications and processes. It enables "loose coupling of party data" (the
business payload) in conjunction with loose coupling of the software services infrastructure (web
services-WSDL and other standards).
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ciq
.
Standard: OASIS - Business-Centric Methodology (BCM)
Business Centric-Methodology, BCM is a comprehensive approach and proven techniques that
enable a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and support enterprise agility and interoperability.
The Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) for Enterprise Agility and Interoperability is a roadmap for
the development and implementation of procedures that produces effective, efficient, and sustainable
interoperability mechanisms. The methodology emphasizes Business First; shifting power and
responsibility to the users -- customers and business domain experts. Business is defined for this
specification in broad terms as the reason for an organizations existence their functional domain.
The BCM task is to provide an overall roadmap for developing interactions between collaboration
partners and within Communities of Interest (CoI) or Communities of Practice. The roadmap can be
used for new development, providing guidance in defining requirements for the procurement of
products, and for providing the structure for interfacing to extend legacy application and services. The
BCM offers an approach for managers facing the problem of tying together disparate systems and
services. The approach extends the traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) model which
only provides internal viewpoints and reengineering of an organizations processes.
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=bcm#overview
.
Standard: OASIS - Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM)
Content Assembly Mechanism, is a generalized assembly mechanism for using templates of XML
business transaction content and the associated rules. CAM templates augment schema syntax and
provide implementers with the means to specify interoperable interchange patterns.
The Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM) provides an open XML based system for using business
rules to define, validate and compose specific business documents from generalized schema
elements and structures. A CAM rule set and document assembly template defines the specific
business context, content requirement, and transactional function of a document. A CAM template
must be capable of consistently reproducing documents that can successfully carry out the specific
transactional function that they were designed for. CAM also provides the foundation for creating
industry libraries and dictionaries of schema elements and business document structures to support
business process needs. The core role of the OASIS CAM specifications is therefore to provide a
generic standalone content assembly mechanism that extends beyond the basic structural definition
features in XML and schema to provide a comprehensive system with which to define dynamic e-
business interoperability.

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=cam
...
Standard: XBRL
XBRL offers major benefits at all stages of business reporting and analysis. The benefits are seen in
automation, cost saving, faster, more reliable and more accurate handling of data, improved analysis
and in better quality of information and decision-making.

XBRL enables producers and consumers of financial data to switch resources away from costly
manual processes, typically involving time-consuming comparison, assembly and re-entry of data.
They are able to concentrate effort on analysis, aided by software which can validate and manipulate
XBRL information. As just one example, searches for particular information which might in the past
have taken hours can be completed with XBRL in a fraction of a second.

Those who stand to benefit include all who collect business data, including governments, regulators,
economic agencies, stock exchanges, financial information companies and the like, and those who
produce or use it, including accountants, auditors, company managers, financial analysts, investors
and creditors. Among those who can take advantage of XBRL include accountancy software vendors,
the financial services industry, investor relations companies and the information technology industry.
http://www.xbrl.org/
XBRL SA Jurisdiction:
http://www2.xbrl.org/za/
As an example the SEC require reporting in XBRL via Edgar and you can find some info at:
http://www.tryxbrl.com/Default.aspx
.
Standard: ISO - Schematron
Schematron is a language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML
documents. Schematron is used for business rules validation, data reporting, general validation, quali-
ty control, quality assurance, firewalling, constraint checking, naming and design rules checking, sta-
tistical consistency, data exploration.
Schematron is an ISO standard which has uptake in many industries, notably the financial sector (es-
pecially insurance), governmental record exchange, and technical and reference publishing.
Is Schematron a replacement for XSD?
While Schematron can express the same constraints that can be expressed in grammar-based
schema languages such as XSD (W3C XML Schemas), RELAX NG and DTDs, very often it is used
as an adjunct to supplement the intrinsic weak points of grammars if necessary, or to express con-
straints that may belong to a different conceptual layer such as business rules.
http://www.schematron.com/
..
EDM Council
The EDM Council is a neutral business forum founded by the financial industry to elevate the practice
of data management as a business and operational priority. The prime directive is to ensure that
users have trust and confidence that data is precisely what is expected without the need for manual
recalculation or multiple data transformations.
The program of the Council is organized into four broad activities.
Data Content Standards
The Council is working to establish and implement the standards-based infrastructure essential for
operational management. The core objectives are unique and precise identification of financial
instruments; unambiguous identification of all business entities; consistent and legally precise
language of the contracts that govern the financial industry; and a classification scheme that supports
data aggregation and analysis.
Data Management Best Practices
The Council documents the science and discipline of data management and publishes examples of
best practice implementation. We are the originators of the Data Management Maturity (DMM) Model
assessment methodology developed in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University. Council
members place a strong emphasis on data quality and on the development of data quality assurance
best practices across the industry.
Data Implications of Regulation
The Council supports the global legislative objectives of transparency, financial stability, compressed
clearing and settlement cycles and cross-asset market surveillance. We take an activist role in helping
to ensure that the data requirements for these regulatory (and business) goals are well defined and
that the objectives of accurate/comparable data are achieved.
Business Network
The EDM Council is recognized as the global meeting ground for the financial information industry.
We provide a global mechanism for all segments of the financial information industry to meet and
establish the long-standing relationships essential for success in todays business environment.
http://www.edmcouncil.org/default.aspx

Microsoft: 2012 SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
- Integration
o ETL
o XML and Web Services
- Business Intelligence and Big Data
o Includes Hadoop connectors
- Master Data Management
o Includes Rules
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/enterprise-information-
management/integration.aspx
..
Microsoft: BizTalk Server
- Rules
- Adapters
- Messaging
- XML and Web Services protocols
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/overview.aspx
Adapters
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/adapters-included.aspx
..
Middleware Platform:
Informatica
- ETL
- XML and Web Services, including Acord
- Rules
- Messaging
- Master Data Management
- Big Data, includes support of Hadoop
Overview for insurance:
http://www.informatica.com/us/solutions/industry-solutions/financial-services/insurance/
Overview of Enterprise Data Integration products:
http://www.informatica.com/us/products/enterprise-data-integration/powerexchange/powerexchange-
sources-and-targets/

Middleware Platform:
Adeptia: Enterprise Business Integration Suite
- ETL
- Messaging
- Flexible pricing
- Comprehensive solution
- Trail versions available
- Supports standards including Acord and RosettaNet, amongst others
- Includes Forms
http://www.adeptia.com/products/enterprise_business_integration_management.html
..
Middleware Platform:
Software AG: webMethods
http://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/wm/default.asp
..
Middleware Platform:
TIBCO
http://www.tibco.com/products/product-index/default.jsp
..
Middleware Platform:
Progress Software:
http://www.progress.com/en/products/products.html

SAP example of middleware: SAP NetWeaver
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-8941
.
Apache Hadoop
The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed
computing.
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large
data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up
from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather
than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle
failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of
computers, each of which may be prone to failures.
The project includes these modules:
- Hadoop Common: The common utilities that support the other Hadoop modules.
- Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS): A distributed file system that provides high-
throughput access to application data.
- Hadoop YARN: A framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management.
- Hadoop MapReduce: A YARN-based system for parallel processing of large data sets

http://hadoop.apache.org/
and
Hadoop with Cloudera
Developed by Cloudera architect Doug Cutting, Hadoop is open source software that enables
distributed parallel processing of huge amounts of data across inexpensive, commodity servers.
Simply put, Hadoop can transform the way you store and process data throughout your enterprise.
According to analysts, about 80% of the data in the world is unstructured, and until Hadoop, it was
essentially unusable in any systematic way. With Hadoop, for the first time you can combine all your
data and look at it as one.
Make All Your Data Profitable
Hadoop enables you to gain insight from all the data you already have; to ingest the data flowing into
your systems 24/7 and leverage it to make optimizations that were impossible before; to make
decisions based on hard data, not hunches; to look at complete data, not samples; to look at years of
transactions, not days or weeks. In short, Hadoop will change the way you run your organization.
Leverage All Types of Data, From All Types of Systems
Hadoop can handle all types of data from disparate systems: structured, unstructured, log files,
pictures, audio files, communications records, email just about anything you can think of. Even when
different types of data have been stored in unrelated systems, you can dump it all into your Hadoop
cluster before you even know how you might take advantage of it in the future.
Scale Beyond Anything You Have Today
The largest social network in the world is built on the same open-source technology as Hadoop, and
now exceeds 100 petabytes. Its unlikely your organization has that much data. As you need more
capacity, you just add more commodity servers and Hadoop automatically incorporates the new
storage and compute capacity.
http://www.cloudera.com/

Some interesting and potentially useful software:
Intentional Software Corporation
Knowledge is the primary vehicle for productivity and innovation across major industries, from
financial services, healthcare, to manufacturing. But turning knowledge into operation is a productivity
and innovation bottleneck.
Intentional Software removes this bottleneck using a radical new approach: knowledge is recorded in
a form that can directly be turned into work products, including running software.
Businesses invest a great deal of time and expense developing software and other work products. But
all too often the knowledge and insights gained disappear into the details of the code or at best only
exist in documents with slender ties to the actual work product. Another name for this latent value is
the intent behind the software.
Intentional uses a radical new approach to knowledge work: knowledge is recorded in a form that can
directly be turned into running software. End users describe knowledge which automatically turns into
running software accelerating or removing large parts of the software creation process. Every
company has unique business knowledge that makes them competitive. This knowledge is encoded
into a tangible knowledge asset of unique recorded intellectual property.
Intentional captures the tremendous latent value that is usually lost in the development process and
makes it part of the software. Using Intentional the domain knowledge is captured, not lost. All
stakeholders programmers, domain experts and others can have their intent clearly represented.
This increases the quality and value of the knowledge, and making it easier to develop, maintain and
change.
Technology:
1. Business user and software engineer sit at the same side of the table
2. Business domain is separated from software domain
3. Mix multiple domains
http://intentsoft.com/overview/
.
Asana
- Multiple workspaces
Workspaces give you a place to organize all the teams in your life. Collaborate with your
friends, your clubs, and your work team while keeping everything separate.
- People views
Find the tasks and priorities for anyone on your team with one click. You can see what's been
marked for Today, and what's waiting in the wings.
- Follow tasks or projects
Get notified of changes to the tasks and projects that matter to you. Add a coworker to a task
and they'll get all the background
- Real-time: see changes immediately
See your teams' changes in Asana in real time keystroke for keystroke.
- Activity feed for every task
All the history and discussions for each task are kept together, so you can see exactly where
things are & what's happened.
Free for up to 30 users
http://asana.com/product

In terms of the XML Schema's that are out there, you can find some of them listed at:

http://www.schemacentral.com/
.
You may also find some useful info at The XML Guild, although I am not sure how current it is:
http://xmlguild.org/authoring-tools
There are also some books which may be of interest:
- Advanced XML Applications from the Experts at The XML Guild - http://amzn.to/OYfygj
- Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA - http://amzn.to/OYfDkc
- Definitive XML Schema - http://amzn.to/MZQx8R

Microsoft: Word 2013
Word 2013 Preview helps you produce professional looking documents by providing a comprehensive
set of tools for creating and formatting a document. Rich review, commenting, and comparison
capabilities help you quickly gather and manage feedback from colleagues. Advanced data
integration ensures that documents stay connected to important sources of business information.
Enhancements to content controls
You can programmatically use the redesigned content control features in content controls in Word
2013 Preview. New features include repeating content controls, color coding, and control over the
appearance of the content control in the document. Content controls are bounded and potentially
labeled regions in a document that serve as containers for specific types of content (see Figure 13).
Individual content controls can contain content such as dates, lists, or paragraphs of formatted text.
These content controls enable you to create rich, structured blocks of content and create templates
that insert well-defined blocks into your documents.
Figure: Repeating content controls


Specify settings for Reading Mode
Settings for Reading Mode can now be set programmatically in Word 2013 Preview. These settings
include text scaling, layout, and line length.
UI for XML Mappings
You can now create XML mappings to content controls natively via a task pane available from the
ribbon UI, as opposed to the need for VBA and/or file format manipulation required in Word 2010 and
Microsoft Office Word 2007. The task pane enables you to visually set up XML mappings to content
controls within the document.
For more information about features in Word 2013 Preview, see What's new for Word 2013
developers.
..
Microsoft: InfoPath 2013
What's New for InfoPath Developers:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa947697(v=office.15).aspx