In the interest of sanity and progress, I have broken up Rich's, Michael's, Monica's and Eilon's emails into four subjects - Shared Transient Information , Persistent Information Scope , createEntity/createTemplate/createPortlet , session and entity handles , and Property lists . This email will deal with Persisent Information Scope , and the relevant quotes from the emails and my reply to them: Michael wrote: > 2) I think the specification should recognize the per consumer scope. I > understand a producer will be able to manage this scope transparently once we > add a registration handle but I don't think that just because it can be > inferred from the model we should ignore it (from the spec/description). > 3) The definition of the persistent information type needs to be tightened. > As written it implies a relationship with User transient information as both > are claimed to be scoped to a user. Whereas a session is scoped one-to-one to > a user I don't believe persistent information is scoped one-to-one to a user. > Rather I believe we have discussed situations where the mapping is 1 to N. > I.e. the producer may be asked to operate on the sample persistent entity for > differing concurrent user (sessions). This seems to imply that the scope of > persistent information is whatever the consumer chooses it to be. So now Gil writes: I definitely agree on point #3. What I said was actually one Usage of the persistent information (i.e. one use is to tie it to the user), but yours is actually the more general - the scope of ' persistent information' is whatever the Consumer chooses it to be. Objections, anybody? If not, I will change the draft spec appropriately. I am unclear about Point #2 above. When you're saying the specification should recognize the per Consumer scope , you are talking about the scope on what type of information (user transient, shared transient, or persistent)? If it doesn't correlate to any type of information and is more of a general comment, then can you please elaborate? (e.g. an example, a proposed change to the spec)