IT Professionals choose technology and products based on innovative functionality, business need, and value, and apply a variety of strategies to create interoperability for their IT systems. To support these diverse customer needs and choices, Microsoft designs and develops innovative product solutions.

Microsoft and Novell Deliver Joint Virtualization Solution for Mixed-Source Environments

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 provides a simplified, reliable and optimized virtualization solution that easily plugs into existing IT environments. Available as a no-cost Web download, it enables improved server utilization and reduces costs by providing an optimized virtualization solution for customers to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a physical server.

Microsoft Offers New and Enhanced Features for VMs Running on Windows Server 2008

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 helps IT Pros manage multivendor virtualization, operating systems, and applications. These technology innovations are designed to expand virtualization capabilities and introduce the use of open source technologies and industry standards to broaden the ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.

Microsoft, EMC and IBM Work to Achieve Interoperability between ECM Systems

Microsoft has collaborated with EMC, IBM and other leading software vendors to create the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. The jointly developed specification is designed to simplify interoperability with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems by leveraging existing open standards including SOAP, REST and Atom.

CMIS demonstrates Microsoft's enhanced support for industry standards and will allow developers and independent software vendors to better interact with existing ECM systems and invent new solutions for customers. For more resources on CMIS, visit the CMIS Virtual Pressroom.

Microsoft Expands Interoperability for the Identity Metasystem

The Identity Metasystem is an interoperable architecture launched in 2005 for digital identity that assumes people will have several digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. Using this approach, customers will be able to continue to use their existing identity infrastructure investments, choose the identity technology that works best for them, and more easily migrate from old technologies to new technologies without sacrificing interoperability with others. Read the announcement about Microsoft’s collaboration with Zend Technologies to support information cards for PHP developers.