The official Sage SData Specification has now been released. SData (which stands for "Sage Data") is a Sage communication protocol. Using SData you have a common protocol that defines data access, consumption, and exchange between Sage application and 3rd party applications as well. The SData specification is now released and public.

The new Sage website, sdata.sage.com, provides all the details and the complete specification. Take a look:

  View the SData Specification website

The SData 1.0 specification brings some exciting new possibilities for the future of Sage products. For companies that use multiple products from Sage such as SalesLogix, MAS, SageCRM, etc, there will be some great things that this will make possible. However, even more exciting for me are the possibilities of developing 3rd party applications that work with Sage products using SData for communication.

Some of the more exciting areas I'd suggest you take a look at are:

• The SData Core Specification (PDF) (Get up to speed on how to construct SData feed URLs and services)
• The SData Core Specification (Online version)
• SData under the covers (great intro for those not familiar with SData yet)
  
• SData Showcases & Downloads (some sample apps, like an Outlook contact import, and Excel addin for consuming SData, as well as an SData validation tool)
• SData Custom Extensions (for a look at some extension contracts for global data exchange between different applications)