ACORD Updates

Today is the last day of the four day ACORD submit in sunny Ft. Lauderdale. On a personal note I am happy to be out of the rain! There was quite a bit covered this session. I think ACORD is starting to feel some outside pressure to deliver. From what I am told membership has stagnated. I will not cover the business or detailed specification changes that happened but some of the more exciting items with version 2.0 of the specification and some futures. Version 2.0 is now in the Candidate Recommendation Stage. This is a big step forward for the standard. But what I am really excited about is the Unified Messaging version of the standard. This version promises: A single library of business messages Support of the insurance value chain Geography neutral Support for the standards framework Support all domains and LOB's I am happy to say it looks like this standard is heading in the right direction. I was a bit worried after they went down the XML path. The last time I deployed an application using the ACORD schema it was cumbersome and to heavy. It just didn't perform much less scale. I think after some lessons learned they are back on track. Microsoft is helping were we can to aid in this effort!