Interoperability Articles

Microsoft‘s approach to interoperability

Governments today must do more with less. This means delivering easy-to-use services and information to citizens by taking advantage of transformative technologies, from the Internet to mobile communications to social networking to cloud computing. It also means transforming not only the public-facing side of government, but also internal operations. For departments and ministries to work together more collaboratively, their various technology systems must be able to interoperate seamlessly.

Technology interoperability is one key to achieve these goals. Interoperability lets diverse systems “talk” to each other, share data, and process transactions spanning different databases and applications. It means that you can get more value out of your existing systems.

By its very nature, interoperability requires collaboration. Microsoft recognizes that no software company working alone can provide for every customer‘s needs. That is why we have committed to interoperability as a fundamental capability of our high volume products, a greater openness as a fundamental value of our business. Because there are many aspects of technology, we take a multifaceted approach to advancing interoperability:

Products—We continue to enhance our products with greater interoperability and new capabilities that can help reduce the cost of running a mixed IT environment (such as cross-platform management and virtualization) and enhance the seamless flow of information and portability of documents (such as open data and document format interoperability).

Access—We make Microsoft intellectual property (IP) broadly available to developers and competitors, including over a million lines of code and more than 86,000 pages of technical documentation for the protocols we use.

Community—We team up with customers, partners, and competitors to ensure that our systems interoperate. This includes working with open source communities by way of commercial partnerships, cooperative engineering agreements, and technical collaboration. In fact, more than 11,000 projects are documented on our open source project hosting Web site. And there are more than 80,000 open source applications that run on Windows.

Standards—Technical standards are an important tool to enhance interoperability among products. Each year, Microsoft contributes to and collaborates with more than 150 national and international standards organizations.

Our open approach to interoperability builds customer choice, drives developer innovation, and grows industry opportunity. That‘s good for customers, good for our business, and good for the IT industry.