The SyncML Initiative

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The SyncML Initiative, Ltd. was a non-profit corporation formed by a group of companies who co-operated to produce an open standard for data synchronization and device management.

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed. There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage.

Data synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to a target data storage and vice versa and the continuous harmonization of the data over time. It is fundamental to a wide variety of applications, including file synchronization and mobile device synchronization e.g., for PDAs. Synchronization can also be useful in encryption for synchronizing Public Key Servers.

Prior to SyncML, data synchronization and device management had been based on a set of different, proprietary protocols, each functioning only with a limited number of devices, systems and data types.

SyncML is the former name for a platform-independent information synchronization standard. The project is currently referred to as Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management. The purpose of SyncML is to offer an open standard as a replacement for existing data synchronization solutions, which have mostly been somewhat vendor-, application- or operating system specific.

In telecommunications, a proprietary protocol is a communications protocol owned by a single organization or individual.

The SyncML Initiative, Ltd. consolidated into the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) in 2002, contributing their technical work to the OMA technical Working Groups: Device Management Working Group and Data Synchronization Working Group. The SyncML legacy specifications were converted to the OMA format with the 1.2.2 versions of OMA SyncML, OMA Data Synchronization and OMA Device Management specifications.

The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile phone industry. It is not a formal government-sponsored standards organization like the ITU, but a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common specifications for products and services.

OMA Device Management is a device management protocol specified by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Device Management (DM) Working Group and the Data Synchronization (DS) Working Group. The current approved specification of OMA DM is version 1.2.1, the latest modifications to this version released in June 2008. The candidate release 2.0 was scheduled to be finalized in September 2013.

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