Dear All: I'm very sorry about the slow delivery of the updated BES spec. I thought that I'd be able to send it after my flight out to Vancouver prior to my vacation, but failed to get email connectivity. In any case, I enclose a new document with many changes. If you send comments before Sunday morning, I can try to address them on the flight back Sunday afternoon. I've tried to document some of the primary changes below. However, I really think it is important for people to read the document carefully, as there may well be other things that seemed unimportant to me but are in fact problematic. We should then discuss issues that seem problematic on a telecon. 1) Things that have changed: a) I've broken existing operations out into separate BES-Factory and BES-Management port-types, and added a new BES-Activity port-type. b) I've removed the material on separate WSRF and RMF renderings, and the material on notification, based on the assumption that we can do what David Snelling proposes and define BES in such a way that other desired behaviors (e.g. WSRF-specific or WS-Transfer-specific operations) can be added if/when desired via composition. To this end, I've also introduced the WS-BaseFaults faults. I realize that these changes haven't been approved, so we may need to back them out. But at least this way you can see what it looks like. c) I removed the "laststate" component from the "ActivityStatus" type, because this component seemed to be there specifically to deal with suspended activities, which are not longer part of the core specification. Presumably a BES that supports an extended state model with suspension will need to introduce "laststate" as an extension to the ActivityStatus type. 2) Things that seem problematic, or that are not done: a) We need a new state model section: I think someone is writing one? (I removed what is there.) b) I can't recall the new base states; these need to be entered. c) We need to update the BES-Factory attributes. d) I assume there should be per-activity BES-Activity attributes. I haven't entered any. e) I've introduced "subscription" and "lifetime management" elements as optional JSDL extensions. Certainly people that compose WS-Notification/WS-Eventing and WS-ResourceLifetime, respectively, with BES will want to use these. However, it may be that it is not appropriate to mention them in the BES spec, because they are specific to other WSRF/WS-Transfer specs. (I myself think that they should not be there, but I want to raise the topic to get other people's views.) f) The normative stuff in the appendices hasn't been completed. Regards -- Ian.