Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] Who use online office software ,such as Google drive ,Microsoft office 365, Do you think it need break the information island？

From: "Michiel B. de Jong" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 14:00:36 +0200

On 2013-06-30 10:36, Zhun Guo wrote:
> Dear all, 
> Who use online office software ,such as Google drive ,Microsoft 
> office
> 365, Do you think it need break the information island (information
> silo)? I have subitted a Internet-drafts about this topic :
>
> THE INTERCONNECTION AND INTEROPERABILITY OF DIFFERENT CLOUD-OFFICE
> APPLICATIONS (IDCOA) WITH THE HTML FILE FORMAT , . PLEASE GIVE ME
> MORE SUGGESTION!
>
> Best regards!
>
> Zhun Guo

Hi Zhun,

I had a quick read through your draft, 
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-guo-idoca-with-the-html-file-format-00.txt 
here are some questions:

- how is the scheme proposed in 4.1 (websocket+oauth) different from 
the scheme described in figure 5 (self-authenticating URL)?
- what makes you propose websockets for server-to-server communication? 
i think https would do a sufficient job there
- you don't describe the actual communication between the two servers. 
say [email-masked] initiates the transfer of a document to [email-masked]. 
i would expect a process a bit like:
   - user action: alice tells her server alice.com her intention to send 
a document to bob. in her user interface, there is an addressbook entry 
'bob' which includes the information that bob's online identity for this 
purpose is [email-masked].
   - alice.com uses a webfinger lookup to discover [email-masked]'s 
"post-me-anything" end-point, a https end-point to which you can POST 
anything
   - alice.com does a POST request over https to [email-masked]'s 
"post-me-anything" end-point, with the file type in the "Content-Type" 
request header, and the raw document as the (binary) payload.
   - alice.com adds a dialback header, so bob.com can verify that the 
document comes from [email-masked].
   - supported content-types are: application/ooxml+presentation, 
application/odf+spreadsheet, ... (a list).
   - documents that are received this way and whose content-type is 
understood by bob.com as an office document, automatically show up in 
Bob's "documents inbox" as a document coming from Alice (if dialback 
verification was successful).
- you make a distinction between html documents and documents in other 
formats. although i agree that html is often the best choice, especially 
in an online environment, where the document is likely to be viewed with 
a browser, i think you should not make this distinction as two different 
cases, the "html" case and the "something other than html" case. i don't 
think figures 7 and 8 are fundamentally different from each other, so i 
would merge them into one.
- do you have a sample implementation of this? you can fake the actual 
office software of course, but at least have a demo where you send a 
document from one server to another using your protocol. i think 
implementing such a demo would be a good next step.

in any case, kudos for taking the time to draft this! :) i hope my 
comments are useful to you, and wish you good luck with your project. 
let me know if you want help.

cheers!
Michiel