The OIC Tender Information Management Services [TIMS] was initially specified in Sep 1999.

This specification was carried out to build on the OIC project application that won 1st prize in
the "IT for SME" category of the prestigious Global Bangemann Challenge in June 1999.

The Trophy was awarded by the King of Sweden to Guy BLOMBERG as the developer of the OIC Y2K
Resource Asset Management Project [OICY2KRAMP].

Electronic Tenders are an initial step of the e-Commerce process.

A key issue for Electronic Tenders is Time and Dates.  

A considerable amount of research has been carried to evaluate the suitability of ISO 8601
- International Standard Date and Time Notation for E-tenders.

There are a number of problems using ISO 8601 for e-Business including:

1	there are at least 3 main date formats acceptable under ISO 8601

2 	the size of the date formats render them unacceptable in 8 digit file names for many 
	application particularly with version control issues of documents. 	

	The reason why file name size is important that operating systems are either 8 bit, 16 
	bit or 32 bit ASCII code size.  		

	Software developers build applications that based on the file name size according to the
	type of operating system the application developer is using.	

	To exchange information electronically means that a single date format has to be used 
	otherwise the translation and exchange problems will be considerable and unacceptable to
	Small & Medium size Enterprises [SMEs].		

	Much of the early research in to the RUBAC information management methodology was carried
	out using IBM DisplayWrite and WordPerfect.  	

	Both of these applications had a separate field for the file code and a file description.
 	
	However Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office Products do not have a separate fields for 
	the file code and file description.  This causes considerable problems with Tender 
	attachments and addendums because many of the file names are truncated to 8 digits when
	non-Microsoft applications are used.

3	electronic information flows are based on date and time triggers eg if a response is not
	received by a certain date and time an automatic reminder is transmitted.  

	This requires a single time and date stamp methodology particularly for international 
	trade and project management

	A single date and time ASCII Gregorian Date version of ISO 8601 was developed for 
	e-Tenders.