I’ve posted extensively about our various interop related efforts over the last year or so, highlighting many of the big steps that we have made in this area, each one incrementally making us a more interoperable platform than before and a more participatory citizen in the wider software industry.
When I came into the office this morning I knew there was a backlog of such announcements building up that I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t quite grasped how much has gone on over the last couple of weeks.
Below is a round up of news around multi-platform development for Azure, the document interoperability initiative, ODF support in Wordpad (!), working with the Samba project, participating in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) WG, SAML 2.0, and OpenID.
First of all is news of what we’re doing for developers around the Windows Azure and Azure Services platform that I talked about yesterday. Up on microsoft.com you’ll find pointers to the SDKs that are already under development, not only for .NET but also for Java and Ruby, and a whitepaper that explains the objectives of these projects.
From the whitepaper;
The Azure Services Platform has been built from the ground up with interoperability in mind. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple Internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and “plain old XML” (POX). This interoperability opens up opportunities to build new or enhanced applications using existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework, or with other developments environments such as Java, or Ruby.
For a product that is still only a community technology preview (CTP) I think we’re off to a good start.
Next is news of the latest Document Interoperability Initiative workshop that was held in Redmond last week, this time focusing on plans for Open XML. The DII workshops are an important component of our commitment to engage more openly and more thoroughly with the community, this is the second workshop to be held in Redmond, the first one looked predominately at our plans for ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2.
Jesper Lund Stocholm has his hands on the beta for the SP2 code, and has posted about his experiences with it earlier this week.
Doug Mahugh has a comprehensive write-up of the latest DII workshop;
The latest DII workshop took place in Redmond over the last two days. There were presentations at this event from a variety of people, including members of the Office product groups at Microsoft and developers and consultants from several other companies. Topics covered included planning an IS29500 document test library, server-side document assembly strategies, various approaches to document validation, use of content controls in e-courseware, and goals for future DII events. John Head already blogged a few thoughts from the workshop, and I expect we’ll see more in the days ahead from John, his colleague Andrew Schwantes, or other blogger attendees such as Dennis Hamilton and Alex Brown. The DII we site has an event summary, and you can find downloadable copies of most of the presentations here.
Doug’s post is lengthy and gives really good insight into the discussions that took place at the event, I’d encourage you to follow the link and read the whole report. There are also a couple more posts on the topic that I’ve seen, John Head of PSC has shared his presentation, and Alex Brown has declared Open XML boring, in the nicest possible way of course!
Finally on DII, for those of you who are really interested in digging into the depths of the topics discussed, all of the Microsoft led presentations have been posted on the Document Interoperability Initiative site.
In other brief document format related news, you might have caught Stephen Sinofsky earlier today mentioning that the version of WordPad in Windows 7 will support both ODF and Open XML, Stephen McGibbon has promised some screen shots.
Applets. “We’ve also decided that once every 15 years or so we’re going to update the applets in Windows,” Sinofsky said, showing off his bone-dry wit. That means updates to Calculator, Paint, WordPad, which will now support open document formats including Open XML and ODF.
Next up is a post from Samba’s Andrew Bartlett in which he discusses the significant progress that has been made between the Samba Project and Microsoft’s Server devlelopment team over the last year, it was Brett Roberts who brought this to my attention, as a tangential point Brett also has some discussion about a recent event he ran alongside Google discussing our respective approaches to Software + Online Services.
Back to Samba, Andrew’s post is here;
This has been an amazing year of changes for those of us with an interest in interoperability with Microsoft, and these two events are an excellent example of the change in practice.
In short, Microsoft organised an industry plug fest for CIFS and AD technologies and then invited the Samba Team to it’s home campus for a week of hands on testing with their engineers. This follows up on documentation of over 100 protocols delivered, well over 100 requests for clarification answered, Samba code debugged and fortnightly conference calls held.
There can be little disagreement that this is night and day from the position we had with the Samba team three or four years ago. I think we probably have a way to go before the company as a whole pervasively understands the value of this type of relationship, but there are certainly a growing and significant number of individuals in the company who “get it”.
Fourth on the list is our recent decision to get involved in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Working Group.
From Sam Ramji’s blog;
Messaging (and I mean enterprise messaging, rather than email) is an area that is of keen interest to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse. As they run their businesses on real-time messaging, they need to be deep experts, and drive changes in their messaging platforms to fit their business. Along with companies like Cisco, Novell, iMatix, RabbitMQ, WSO2, and Red Hat, these industry leaders have built a standard for ubiquitous messaging: AMQP.
The Advanced Message Queueing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities and currently implemented by Apache QPID, RabbitMQ, and OpenAMQ. The contributors established the AMQP Working Group as a body to manage the process of developing the specification.
It’s my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has been invited to join the AMQP working group by the six founding members. We have committed to participate in the development of the specification and are keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging.
This is a great standards story, and a great interoperability story.
Fifth on the list is support for the Web SSO profile for SAML 2.0 in “Geneva”, a code name for our upcoming claims based access platform.
Don Schmidt has the following;
At the Professional Developers Conference this week Microsoft is announcing the beta release of “Geneva”, the codename for its new claims based access platform. This platform helps developers and IT professionals simplify user access to applications and other systems with an open claims-based model. “Geneva” helps developers to externalize user authentication and identity processing from application code by using claims that are obtained with pre-built security logic that is integrated with .NET tools. “Geneva” helps IT professionals to efficiently deploy and manage new applications by reducing user account management, promoting a consistent security model, and facilitating seamless collaboration across departmental, organizational and vendor boundaries. User access benefits include shortened provisioning lead times, reduced accounts, passwords and logins, and enhanced privacy support. “Geneva” implements the Identity Metasystem vision for open and interoperable identity, and includes built-in support for standard federated identity protocols.
SAML 2.0 support by Microsoft has been a big discussion point here in the region, especially in countries such as New Zealand where SAML plays key roles in the government’s national authentication program.
Finally, and equally important, an announcement from the LiveID team at PDC yesterday that they will be supporting OpenID.
TechCrunch has some info on this announcement;
Login standard OpenID has gotten a huge boost today from Microsoft, as the company has announced that users will soon be able to login to any OpenID site using their Windows Live IDs. With over 400 million Windows Live accounts (many of which see frequent use on the Live’s Mail and Messenger services), the announcement is a massive win for OpenID. And Microsoft isn’t just supporting OpenID – the announcement goes as far as to call it the de facto login standard.
…as does Microosft’s Peter Galli;
This means that Windows Live ID accounts will be able to be used to sign in to any OpenID Web site. The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites-for example: Plaxo, Pibb, StackOverflow.com and Wikispaces.
Putting around half a billion LiveID users to one side. this is good news for me personally, next time I want to post a comment on Harish Pillay’s blog I won’t need to do it anonymously!
That should be more than enough for one post, as I’ve said before it is evidence that we’re delivering on the public promises we have made around interoperability that will eventually make a difference to the way that developers, ISVs, customers and other partners perceive us.
This week feels like it has delivered a pretty strong set of evidence to support those public statements… and it is still only the second day of PDC!
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