ARTS Develops New POS Standard
The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the standards division of the National Retail Federation, is pleased to announce the release for comments of Web Services Point of Service (WS-POS). WS-POS is a new standard currently under development as part of UnifiedPOS version 2.0, planned for release in late 2009. WS-POS enables POS devices such as printers, scales and scanners to be connected to multiple transaction touch points such as POS terminals, mobile devices, virtual POS terminals and enable the retailer to use the power of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to allow access to POS peripherals anywhere in the store or enterprise.
The benefits of WS-POS for retailers include: ease of integration with new and existing devices in an absolutely vendor and application neutral manner, reduced investment by allowing the sharing of peripheral devices, faster reconfiguration of hardware and software to meet the ever changing requirements for better shopper experiences and the potential for increased customer satisfaction through faster check out services. Hardware and Software providers benefit from ease of implementation in all operating environments and simplified device management across the enterprise.
When WS-POS V1.0 completes its Public Review cycle and all public feedback has been evaluated by the work team, it will then be presented to the ARTS Technical Committee for vote, a process expected to be completed in first quarter 2009.
In the meantime work continues on UnifiedPOS 2.0 which represents a fresh look at how to interconnect POS peripherals in an environment based upon the industry advances in software and hardware technologies. UnifiedPOS 1.13 includes updates that reflect continued feedback from device service developers and application development programmers based upon their use of earlier versions of the UnifiedPOS specification. In addition it includes enhancement to the POS Printer to better facilitate the creation of form like receipts and documents that require drawing of continuous "ruled lines;" added additional two dimensional bar code symbologies to the POS Printer for Data Matrix, QR Code, Micro QR Code, Aztec, and Micro PDF 417. It includes changes to the Tone Indicator device to allow "melody" tones or fixed two tone sequences ("siren tones") to be produced enabling better feedback for operator and customer experiences. Also included are enhancement to the reading of weight on the Scale device allowing a zero weight as a valid measurement and further refinement of the requirements for using XML-POS, the foundation of Release 2.0 and the basis of future generation XML-aware POS peripherals.
The benefits of WS-POS for retailers include: ease of integration with new and existing devices in an absolutely vendor and application neutral manner, reduced investment by allowing the sharing of peripheral devices, faster reconfiguration of hardware and software to meet the ever changing requirements for better shopper experiences and the potential for increased customer satisfaction through faster check out services. Hardware and Software providers benefit from ease of implementation in all operating environments and simplified device management across the enterprise.
When WS-POS V1.0 completes its Public Review cycle and all public feedback has been evaluated by the work team, it will then be presented to the ARTS Technical Committee for vote, a process expected to be completed in first quarter 2009.
In the meantime work continues on UnifiedPOS 2.0 which represents a fresh look at how to interconnect POS peripherals in an environment based upon the industry advances in software and hardware technologies. UnifiedPOS 1.13 includes updates that reflect continued feedback from device service developers and application development programmers based upon their use of earlier versions of the UnifiedPOS specification. In addition it includes enhancement to the POS Printer to better facilitate the creation of form like receipts and documents that require drawing of continuous "ruled lines;" added additional two dimensional bar code symbologies to the POS Printer for Data Matrix, QR Code, Micro QR Code, Aztec, and Micro PDF 417. It includes changes to the Tone Indicator device to allow "melody" tones or fixed two tone sequences ("siren tones") to be produced enabling better feedback for operator and customer experiences. Also included are enhancement to the reading of weight on the Scale device allowing a zero weight as a valid measurement and further refinement of the requirements for using XML-POS, the foundation of Release 2.0 and the basis of future generation XML-aware POS peripherals.