Re: Cloud Service Descriptor

Uh, what does the index.html have to do with what I was suggesting?

On Nov 22, 2013, at 21:19 , Mike Dierken <dierken@gmail.com> wrote:

> See also : index.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 22, 2013, at 6:10 PM, Andre-John Mas <ajmas@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I am not sure whether this is the best place to ask this, but hopefully someone might be able to provide some feedback:
>> 
>> The basic idea is to have cloud services provide a simple descriptor file, that describes the services hosted and what the specific URLs are. The file could be in JSON or XML and would include such things as:
>> 
>> - service name
>> - service logo (possibly different sizes)
>> - service description 
>> - reference to licence 
>> - list of services (e-mail, storage, calendar, contacts, etc) and their URLs
>> 
>> This descriptor would generally be found at the root of a domain (http://mydomain.net, for example)or on a specific server (http://myserver.somedomain.org). Also, for security reasons it would only be visible to authenticated users, this also provides the optional benefit of having a dynamic descriptor which lists only the services available to the authenticated user. There might be a use case for a simple version of the file, visible to non-authenticated users, but at this point I have researched things enough to decide on this.
>> 
>> Microsoft already provides a descriptor file for exchange based services, so in certain ways it is about building on that concept, but also making it more generally available, eventually as an RFC (ideally). The benefit would be that on your tablet or PC you would indicate the domain name for the cloud service provider and the rest of the information is discovered, transparent to the user. 
>> 
>> The next step would to be to create an open client library that leverages this. 
>> 
>> Anyhow that's the idea. Any thoughts?
>> 
>> Regards
>> 
>> Andre