The European fashion and high-end industries are global leaders accounting for 10% of European exports.

Cloud based service provider Tradeshift have announced a new partnership with Intuit that will connect the five million businesses who use QuickBooks onto Tradeshift and create the largest network of companies on one platform that the world has ever seen.

The Tradeshift platform is based on OASIS UBL.

For a discussion on the implications of this see Pete Loughlin's article on PurchasingInsight.

G. Ken Holman of Crane Softwrights, long-time member of the UBL TC, was recognized as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor at the consortium's annual meeting on 25 July 2012. Ken was chosen for his outstanding achievements in the areas of new work, influence, ability to build consensus, leadership and service to the consortium. Congratulations, Ken!</p>

By January 1, 2013, the new European VAT Directive regarding the rules on invoicing which enforces equal treatment between paper and electronic invoices, will come into force in all Member States. By this time, all Austrian federal services will be able to receive eInvoices and from January 1st, 2014, all Austrian suppliers (and foreign suppliers that have the technical means) of the Austrian Federal Government are obliged to use eInvoices according to the Austrian ICT consolidation law (IKTKonG).

Video presentation of the eGovernment conference in Poznan Poland, November 2011, featuring PEPPOL, Pan European Public eProcurement online.

This OASIS 30-day public review will be held from 26 August to 24 September 2011. This is an open invitation to comment. OASIS solicits feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of its technical work. The specification was previously submitted for a 60-day public review on 25 September 2010 [2]. This review is limited in scope to changes made from the previous review. Changes are detailed in section B.3.4 of the Committee Specification Draft.

Perceptant today announced support for UBL, an open xml standard for B2B messaging that facilitates the exchange of catalogue, pricing, stock and transaction information between buyers and suppliers...Perceptant's iHUB, iBAM and SCMaaS (Supply Chain Management as a Service) products leverage XML and incorporate its strengths into a comprehensive business application environment - managing all critical aspects of integrating and automating interactions between customers, partners and suppliers.

GEFEG mbH announced immediate availability of the EDIFIX 5.0 UBL Reader, enabling companies' easy access and view of UBL 0.70, UBL 1.0 Beta Release and UBL 1.0 Final, an OASIS Committee Draft by the OASIS Universal Business Language Technical Committee for public implementation. The UBL Reader is a variant of the scalable product line GEFEG EDIFIX®. EDIFIX has been selected by the OASIS UBL Technical Committee to parse the spreadsheet data models and produce a schema representation adhering to the UBL 1.0 Naming and Design Rules.

In 2008, the European textile and clothing industry (according to data provided by Euratex, the European Apparel and Textile Confederation) was comprised of 160.000 companies that employed a total of 2.350 million employees.
The textile and clothing supply chain in Europe is characterised by a large presence of small and medium size enterprises, with an average number of 16.6 employees per company in the EU of 27. Long term trends of globalization and trade liberalization have challenged the competitiveness of the textile industry in Europe.