[Fwd: PKI Support in Your Products]

attached mail follows:

We, the OASIS PKI Technical Committee, are working
to improve Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and to
remove obstacles to PKI deployment and usage. Since
you have a product relevant to PKI, we'd like to
ask for a small amount of assistance.

Please forward this email to your Product Manager or
someone who insight into the process by which the
feature set for your AbiWord product is chosen.

Thanks,

Steve Hanna
Co-chair, OASIS PKI Technical Committee

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Dear Sir/Madam,

In our recent survey of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
users and experts, the OASIS PKI Technical Committee
found that the primary obstacle to PKI deployment and
usage was "Software Applications Don't Support It".
Textual comments indicated that many applications have
no PKI support and that, when present, application PKI
support differs widely and is often incompatible. This
makes it very hard for users to deploy PKI. They must
spend large amounts of money on PKI enablement (PKE),
adding PKI support to applications and customizing
applications to work in their PKI installation.

The OASIS PKI TC has developed a PKI Action Plan in
response to the survey results. One of the Action
Items in this plan calls for us to "Ask Application
Vendors What They Need" to provide better PKI support.
Then we will work to provide whatever's lacking.

So we'd like to ask you to complete the following
short survey exploring what could be done to help
you provide better support for PKI (Public Key
Infrastructure).

Why is this worth your valuable time? The market for
PKI enabled applications is potentially quite large.
The U.S. Department of Defense is now deploying
PKI enabled smart cards to 4 million workers.
Deployment at the FBI is under way and discussions
have begun on extending the system throughout the
U.S. government. In Europe, Asia, and around the world,
PKI initiatives are under way and in some cases large
and well established. Corporate adoption of PKI enabled
smart cards is picking up with large companies
like Johnson and Johnson and Sun Microsystems
leading the way.

By participating in this survey, you will help
us to help you improve PKI support in your products.
If your products already have strong PKI support,
you will help to publicize that fact.

Enough preliminaries. Here's the survey. Please
complete it and return it to me for tabulation.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate
to ask me. And note that we will keep all your
responses confidential. Only overall summaries
will be released.

Thanks,

Steve Hanna
Co-chair, OASIS PKI Technical Committee

P.S. If you would like to review our PKI Action Plan,
please do so. It is available from
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/pki/pkiactionplan.pdf
That document includes URLs for the results from
our previous surveys.

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Vendor Survey on PKI Support
OASIS PKI Technical Committee

1) Do you currently provide products with PKI support?
    If so, which products include PKI support and what
    sort of PKI support do they include (digital signatures,
    certificate-based authentication, encryption, or other)?

2) Are you happy with your PKI support or lack thereof?
    If not, what changes would you like to make? Is there
    something in particular holding you back from making
    these changes? If so, what?

3) Which of the items listed below would be most
    important to your company in deciding whether
    to add or improve PKI support in your products?

Please divide 100 points among these categories
in any way you like to indicate which would be
most important in making your decision.

__ Solid customer demand (projected revenue increase)
__ Better PKI-related standards
__ Interoperability tests
__ PKI support in platforms (Windows, Java, etc.)
__ Cross-platform PKI libraries
__ Training
__ Other (please describe)

4) If the items you marked in the last question
    were provided, do you expect that you would
    decide to add or improve PKI support in your products?

__ Yes
__ No
__ Maybe

5) Do you have any other comments to add, especially
    about adding PKI support to your products?

6) What is your job title?
Received on Tue Sep 7 21:55:15 2004