Interoperability: Connecting People, Data, and Diverse Systems
Interoperability—the ability of diverse IT applications or systems to exchange and use information—is an increasingly important software feature. Customers select and deploy the best products from various vendors to meet their IT needs, and they expect all of those products, whether open source or proprietary, to work together seamlessly.
For this to be true, competitors must also work together. Microsoft is a leader in forging strategic partnerships with the IT community, including competing companies, to provide customers with increased interoperability without compromising the distinctive underlying capabilities of the software.
Microsoft fosters interoperability by making a wide range of its technologies available to customers and others in the IT industry, including Microsoft competitors, through:
Commercial licenses, which make the large and diverse Microsoft portfolio of intellectual property (IP) available for licensing. This portfolio includes source code, schemas, protocols, and documentation, as well as associated copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
Community licensing, which enables no-cost access to technologies that allow others to add on to Microsoft products or build their own unique solutions. This includes free availability of software development kits (SDKs) and driver development kits (DDKs), documented application programming interfaces (APIs), and shared source community programs.
The Open Specification Promise, which was developed with feedback from customers and the open source community. It represents a simplified method for sharing technical assets while recognizing the legitimacy of intellectual property.
Microsoft takes a customer-focused approach to meeting the market demand for enhanced interoperability. Because the best way to meet customer interoperability needs depends on many things, Microsoft implements interoperability by design in several ways, including:
Listening to our customers to understand their needs and designing our software to be interoperable out of the box, without the need for expensive consulting services.
Working with the interoperability community, including partners and competitors.
Providing access to technology.
Implementing and participating in industry standards.
The Interoperability Executive Customer Council was formed in 2006 as a way to identify areas for improved interoperability throughout the software industry. The council focuses on interoperability issues that are of primary importance to customers, including document archiving and management, directory management and synchronization, virtualization, data integration, and exchange.
Initiated in 2006, the Interop Vendor Alliance is a global, cross-industry group of software and hardware vendors that has committed to work together to identify opportunities for enhancing interoperability with Microsoft systems on behalf of their customers. The goal of this industry alliance is to:
Encourage vendor collaboration to foster interoperability. Members can compare customer feedback with the goal of increasing technical collaboration on common interoperability challenges.
Enable scenario-based testing for interoperability. Members work with customers to identify their top interoperability challenges. Microsoft then hosts testing sessions based on specific customer scenarios to validate real-life conditions for customers—including systems management, virtualization, identity management, data integration, storage management, portal integration, and interoperability of developer tools.
Communicate vendor interoperability solutions to customers. The Interop Vendor Alliance provides a Web site where members can post best-practice guides based on the customer scenario testing. Vendors can also post descriptions, white papers, and case studies about their solutions that provide interoperability with Microsoft systems.
