At its meeting in Austin, Texas, last Tuesday, the Object Management Group established a Common Facilities Task Force to develop a specification for distributed compound documents. The specification will use Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking & Embedding software, Apple Computer Inc’s OpenDoc and Lotus Development Corp’s LEL Link Embedded and Launch-to-edit, and will be published in eight or nine months. The Object Management Group also received 11 letters of intent from vendors submitting technology for consideration as specifications for the interoperability and initialisation components of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture version 2.0. The list includes IBM Corp, ICL Plc, SunSoft Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, Hyperdesk Corp, the Open Software Foundation, Expersoft Corp, Iona Technology Ltd and Digital Equipment Corp – DEC’s submission will be supported by Microsoft Corp. Selections should be made by July next year, and the specification is expected by late summer. Meanwhile the Object Group has accepted Hyperdesk’s C++ interface as the standard link between its own Interface Definition Language and C++. It will publish a specification for object persistence in eight weeks, based on joint development work from IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc – this will become part of the Common Object Services Standard. And it has established a user group, which will prepare its own requirements for specifications. It has also set up a taskforce to add object interfaces to transaction processing and security products – this specification should be ready by the middle of next year. Finally, it is working with the US Defense Department and various vendors to make the Portable Common Tools Environment for users building Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant computer-aided software engineering environments.