Formats and protocols - requirements and efforts in establishing formats and standards for exchanging electronic business card information - one of several articles on Personal Data Interchange technologies

RELease 1.0, Sept 23, 1993 by Jerry Michalski

Where are the PIHs?

It would seem that a discussion about personal information would somehow revolve around personal information managers, but PINs haven't done much about PDI. PIMs have historically fought for market share among individual users, a battle in which communication with other PIMs didn't matter much. In fact, the easier it was for a user to transfer information from one PIN to the next, the more readily a customer base might migrate to a newer, fancier product. And two PIN users were not likely to have their pcs handy and decide to pass information from one to the other. As recently as August 1992, the apathy toward inter-PIN cooperation inspired Traveling Software's president Mark Eppley to propose something he called the PIN Data Exchange (PDX) as a standard. PIN vendors showed no interest.

Now, corporations are beginning to look at PIMs as important corporate software and handhelds with native PIN functions are hitting the market. As a result, PIH vendors are changing the way they compete, and are more willing to contemplate interchange. That still doesn't mean they are leading the way. It mostly means that they are making their products play on the corporate network by extending their personal calendaring features to group calendaring, for example.

PIM vendors may worry about conforming to a common data structure and obJect storage convention, which would require massive rewrites of their code and put them at a disadvantage. But PDI is less like Esperanto, where everyone has to switch over and live in the language for it to be effective, than the protocols for a bank ATM card, which lets you go to cities in different countries; transact a simple, consistent piece of business; and receive funds in an appropriate currency. In PIM terms, PDI is about agreeing on what perspective to take on the data -- how to flatten the records for exchange -- not how to store or represent them locally.

PIMs won't really have to adapt much, once they decide to play. Most already have an "import" feature, which could be extended to deal with inbound PDI traffic. The vendors could distinguish themselves from each other by offering more sophisticated software. For example. Arabesque's Ecco PIM has a feature called Shooter that runs in the background, places a small icon on the title bar of any Windows application running when Ecco is running and allows users to pass information to and from Ecco quickly. Arabesque could extend it to parse inbound PDI messages into Ecco's phonebook section, and to export PDI messages to a variety of different target applications (maybe to a telephone via TAPI, Microsoft's Telephony API). Similarly, Rae Technology's Assist PIN, which has some clever built-in assistance, could help a user fill out incomplete fields or compose outbound PDI messages in the format appropriate for the medium used.

Who's on first?

PDI leadership is coming mostly from the new handheld-system vendors, which realize that smooth interchange is a key virtue and selling point. EO's eCard (above) is a good example. PDI seems to be a second-generation feature, though: The first priority is to get a stable device to market.