Have you heard of SSE?

Aaron at the Emerging Earth blog (RSS Subscribe) has this post that talks about the new SSE spec. The spec is based on the functionality of RSS, but for bi-directional use. What happens is that an RSS feed is received from a client, which then triggers an RSS feed response from the recipient. As Microsoft shares, what RSS is doing for aggregating information, SSE will assist in the duplication and replication of information.

As Aaron shared in his blog, some of the specific examples of how it would be used are best shared from Microsoft itself on the MSDN site:

From the user’s perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.

SSE is particularly useful for scenarios in which there are multiple masters and/or asynchronous updates. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse—either of you could enter new appointments, even if not currently connected. Similarly, SSE could be used to replicate a set of calendar entries among a group of people, each working in a different company and using different infrastructure.

This is a current frustration of mine with my current installation of Outlook 2003. My wife and I both use the same installation of the Outlook and have separate profiles setup. What’s irritating to me is that we can’t have a shared contacts list, family calendar or To Do lists. I know it could be done if we had an Exchange Server setup at home, but that’s just not in the budget in our little one computer household.

What’s not clear though is if anyone of this will be built into the new Office 12 architecture. The MSDN site does say this:

SSE is distinct from other work within Microsoft related to RSS, such as the support for RSS within Vista, the next version of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system, and Simple List Extensions to RSS, which can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists, such as photo albums or music playlists. While distinct from other RSS-related projects within Microsoft, SSE is another example of Microsoft’s desire to make it easy for users to discover, read, and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as enable developers to deliver powerful applications that can act on behalf of the user. With SSE, users can use RSS for bidirectional replication, not just unidirectional publish and subscribe.

I’ve sent an e-mail to the Microsoft RSS Team to see if they can answer the question on if this functionality will be built into the new Office.