In an example embodiment, a communication type registry is introduced that stores information about various versions of various communication types permitted within a system. A communication type owner defines a new communication type with a name, version number, and version details, and registers this information with the communication type registry. All source applications and target applications that have registered with the communication type registry then get notified when there is a new communication type or new version of an existing communication type available. Optionally a central repository can be used to store updates for all the source applications and target applications, where those applications can know to look for those updates.