AS if the industry needed a new standards body, a group of 18 information technology companies last week unveiled plans for a consortium to establish specifications that will make common office machines such as copiers, faxes, and computers work better together.
The association is organised under a temporary working title of SmartOffice Association.
It is designing a set of standards, called SmartLink Architecture, and an application program interface (API) that will allow the office appliances to more seamlessly share and swap information.
Association members include some of the world's largest office suppliers, among them IBM, Kodak, Novell and Lexmark - all of the United States - and Japanese giants Matsushita, Ricoh, Sanyo, Fujitsu, Sharp and Toshiba.
The consortium will seek to enlist companies and other interested parties that wish to take part in making different devices interoperate.
The group's operations subcommittee chairman, Robert Pascoe, said last week that the SmartLink Architecture would be made widely available this year.
'The vision of SmartOffice will support manufacturers' efforts to integrate office equipment into a network by supplying them with a standard architecture for interoperability and a standard interface for communications,' Mr Pascoe said.
