Collaboration with IEC Council and other Interoperability Groups Results in Real Progress in Meeting Customer’s Interoperability Needs

Through customer participation and feedback via the IEC Council, six high-priority areas have been identified that pose the greatest technical barriers to interoperability from a customer perspective: Office Productivity and Collaboration Tools; Developer Tools and Runtime; Systems Management; Security and Identity Management; Business Process Modeling; and Interoperability Policy. To identify and develop solutions for these specific areas, workstreams led by Bob Muglia and executives from numerous Microsoft divisions and product teams interact and partner with council members’ technical architects and CIOs.

In addition to technical collaboration with the IEC Council and interoperability-focused groups such as the Visual Studio Integration Partner (VSIP) program, the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) and the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight Project, Microsoft also works to foster interoperability across IT systems through collaboration, scenario-based testing and communication with the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA). The IVA is a cross-industry group of global software and hardware vendors and other organizations established by Microsoft and industry leaders to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems. Alliance membership has more than doubled since 2006 as the IVA has developed multiple interoperability labs including System Management, Centralized Directory, Federated Identity, Content Management, and Open XML.

Since the launch of the IEC Council less than two years ago, more than 60 percent of issues identified as key areas for improved interoperability across Microsoft products and the software industry at large have been addressed. This collaboration has resulted in real progress on interoperability and technical solutions in the following workstreams:

Office Productivity and Collaboration Tools

• Microsoft has launched a toolkit for Office SharePoint Server 2007 interoperability using Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), an OASIS standard, to allow competing portal solutions such as IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic to use content stored in Microsoft SharePoint.

• Microsoft, EMC and IBM are working to achieve interoperability between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems through a jointly developed specification which leverages existing open standards including SOAP, REST and ATOM.

• Continued collaboration with global industry leaders has resulted in the development of three translator technologies which will allow for interoperability between applications based on the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft OpenXML-based Office applications.

• Announced in May 2008, the 2007 Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 will provide support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) within Word 2007, Excel® 2007, and PowerPoint® 2007.

• Microsoft hosts technical discussions and labs in cities around the world through the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), a global program of technical vendor discussions, labs and solution enablement programs designed to promote user choice among document formats for end users and expand opportunity for developers, partners and competitors.

Identity Management

• Microsoft has developed solutions to enable cross-product federation and management of Identities across a diverse array of directories and heterogeneous systems. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) support in Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) provides the interoperability required to simplify the broad federated sharing of digital identities and policies across organizational boundaries. It also provides a standards-based mechanism for establishing trust between different organizational entities.

• To simplify identity-based user access to applications and services, Microsoft has developed a claims-based access platform which offers simplified user access for developers and their IT customers with a single model that’s open and interoperable.

• Microsoft has also made an ongoing investment in interoperability in the Identity space with Information cards using WS-* protocols to help Web developers support the primary mechanism for representing user identities in the identity metasystem,

Systems Management

• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager is currently working with Xen Source to extend management capabilities for Linux VMs running on Windows Server Virtualization. This integration will allow customers to host multiple, heterogeneous OS images on a single virtualization environment and a single console to manage their virtual environments, and provide built-in integration from Windows to VMWare virtual environments.

• In April 2008, Microsoft announced availability of the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions Beta for management of 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.

• Further demonstrating support for its commitment to open source technologies, Microsoft has joined the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contributed code to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.

Developer

• Microsoft has partnered with the Eclipse open source community on the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight project, a cross-platform development environment designed to help Java developers build Silverlight applications and media experiences using Java Web services. The project has been submitted to the Eclipse Foundation and released as an open Eclipse project.

• After gathering feedback from customers and industry partners alike, Microsoft has improved its Visual Studio Integration Partner (VSIP) program by providing easier access to Microsoft Visual Studio integration technology and expanding its co-marketing program to better serve the needs of tools software vendors and enterprise customers.

• As part of ongoing efforts around interoperability with products from other vendors, including open source software, Microsoft has added the technical specifications for XAML – the Extensible Application Markup Language – under its Open Specification Promise (OSP). The release of XAML under the OSP is intended to simplify the building of applications using .NET by increasing transparency and forming an ecosystem of designers and developers around it.

Business Process Modeling

• Microsoft has become a code contributor to the new Apache Stonehenge project made up of companies and developers seeking to enhance interoperability between different software and Web standards implementations.

• Microsoft has announced plans to release the specification for its code name “M” language under its Open Specification Promise, making it possible for third parties, including open source projects, to build implementations for other runtimes, services, applications and operating systems.

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