Following on from a conversation with one of our customers in Australia earlier this morning I thought it might be worthwhile highlighting some of the more collaborative work we have been doing around interop over the last few years.
A quick search will find a growing corpus of information, strategy papers with relevance to CxO level staff through to technical information that might be needed by developers on a day to day basis.
For the purpose of this post I’ll highlight just two pieces on the overall jigsaw puzzle, both of them demonstrating some of the work we have been doing to ensure that we’re more closely involved with the community of customers and developers that work with the Microsoft platform.
The first is a whitepaper that we recently published on the work of a group that we call the “Interoperability Executive Customer Council”.
The IECC was formed in June 2006, and it’s members are a cross section of senior executives that represent many of the segments where we do business. The group meets on a regular basis to discuss interoperability issues within six specific work streams, and then collaboratively work on solutions.
The six work streams are detailed in the whitepaper, along with many examples of the issues raised and the work that has been done (and is being done) to resolve them. They are;
Office Productivity and Collaboration Tools. Office file formats; Office programmability and automation; portal, document, and content management servers; back-end and line-of-business application integration; unified communication; etc.
Systems Management. IT operations management; deployment and patching of software; virtualization environments; etc. IT operations want to optimize the management of heterogeneous enterprise environments while providing top-notch service to users based on their service-level agreements.
Identity Management. Identity federation scenarios for providing partners and customers with encrypted access to internal resources; single sign-on (SSO) techniques; user-centric approaches to identity management through third-party providers and relying parties; and Active Directory–Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration.
Developer Tools and Runtime. Use of different development tools in a distributed environment; robust and high-performance interoperability between .NET and Java/mainframe applications; interoperability with open source languages and tools; consistent implementations of standard cryptology algorithms; etc.
Business Process Modelling (BPM) and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). Facilitating design, development, and management of business processes to run across multiple platforms and systems using multiple, interoperable frameworks and tools for architecture and modelling.
Public Interoperability Policy. Guiding Microsoft in its approach to the Interoperability Principles and related initiatives, and informing Microsoft’s public policy positions for interoperability, intellectual property, privacy, and security.
Click on the graphic of the whitepaper above to download a copy and read the rest for yourself.
My second example is the “Interop Bridges and Labs Center” which is run by our Interoperability Strategy Group. The site has been around for about a year now and provides details on a growing array of point projects where Microsoft engineers are working with customers, partners or open source projects to solve specific interop challenges.
From the about page on the site;
The Interoperability Bridges and Labs Center is dedicated to technical collaborative work between Microsoft, customers, partners and open sources communities to improve interoperability between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies.
The Center is run by the Microsoft Interoperability Strategy Group working with many other teams at Microsoft, with customers input and with the community at large to build technical bridges, labs and solutions to improve interoperability in mixed IT environments.
You will find full details on each of the projects that the team have completed by following this link. The team also maintains a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability.
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