Interoperability News & Articles

Flying under the radar, Microsoft developers submitted a Samba patch in early October and now the Samba team publicly thanks them.

Florent Guillaume, the head of R&D at Nuxeo (news, site), brought the wonders of CMIS to the attendees of Nuxeo World.
 

Microsoft was at O'Reilly's OSCON conference last week speaking about the need for interoperability with cloud platforms. Here is their take on Open data, Open Cloud.

OASIS requires a minimum of 15% votes to ratify a spec as an official standard -- that amount of votes for CMIS v 1.0 has been reached yesterday. Unless something earth-shattering happens, or people wake up in the next few days leading up to April 30 and decide to vote against, we can safely declare CMIS as the newest OASIS standard.

We chatted with some of the Web CMS and Enterprise CMS vendors and contributors to the standard to get their commentary on the latest development.

The official launch of the Windows Azure (news, site) cloud is now upon us. It's been in the works for a few years, and well tested -- even if Microsoft does not fully utilize it themselves.

Recently, the open source Magnolia CMS (news, site) saw its 4.2 version light that brings hierarchical data modeling, simpler integrations with external data sources, updated STK and a new node-builder extending the JSR-170 standard.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Twitter scraps 'suggested users' list


• We're at war! For the Web!


• Facebook implements a new privacy policy


• Twitter and Facebook party with Xbox Live, but it's not poppin'

Microsoft made its first ever keynote at the JavaOne Conference last week reports eWeek, touting their desire for increased interoperability between .NET and Java.

In an interview with eWEEK, Steven Martin, senior director of development platform products at Microsoft said interoperability is important to him, "[Seventy-three] percent of professional developers rely on .NET or a combination of .NET and Java.  In that sense, both Java and .NET have won in the enterprise and it is incumbent on both Microsoft and Sun to ensure that interoperability for the platforms is real, available and as easy to implement as possible."

We've seen and heard many times that many organizations, particularly the larger ones, don't have a single technology stack in-house and there's often a mix of .NET and Java solutions to support. Microsoft knows that and have for the last five years been working closely with Sun on interoperability projects like Web Single Sign On, the Interop Vendor Alliance and virtualization.

Although they have been involved in the JavaOne conferences for a few years, this is the first time they have keynoted. It would have been interesting to see how the Java audience responded to their keynote.

The keynote, conducted by Martin and Dan'l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic and Emerging Business Development, discussed what is happening today in regards to interoperability between .NET and Java and where it is headed in the future.

Interested in hearing exactly what they said? Watch the keynote.

A Montreal-based software and research development company has developed a markup solution and language-neutral asset-descriptor that when fully developed, could result in a universal computer language for representing information in databases, web and document contents and business objects.

While still at a seminal stage of development, the company Gnoesis, aims to address the problem of data fragmentation caused by semantic differences between developers and users from different linguistic backgrounds.

In one of the more abrupt u-turns in recent corporate history, Microsoft announces changes to both development and business practices intended to “increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.”

Details of the announcement:

• Microsoft will publish API specifications for:
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows Server 2008
  • SQL Server 2008
  • Office 2007
  • Exchange Server 2007
  • Office Sharepoint Server 2007
• Microsoft will release 30,000 pages of documentation about client and server protocols. No more secret licenses or partnership agreements.
  • However, Microsoft will “license all of these patents [that cover specific protocols] on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates.”
• Microsoft will not sue developers who make open source versions of its protocols.
• Microsoft will support other document formats in Office 2007 and create new APIs for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to encourage interoperability with new document formats.
• Microsoft plans to launch the Open Source Interoperability Initiative (OSII) to validate these ideals through testing and cooperative development.

Unfortunately, a ship the size of Microsoft doesn’t turn on a dime. Therefore, how long will it be before any of this comes to fruition?

As exciting as this announcement seems on the surface, not everyone is buying in. Tim Bray (via Twitter) has expressed concerns about both the aforementioned “low royalty rates” and how Microsoft plans to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial entities.

What do our readers think? Is this just more smoke out of Redmond or is there a legitimate fire there?

Official information can be found at Microsoft Interoperability and special thanks go out to The Register for providing early coverage.

In other news, reports out of Hell indicate temperatures are dropping rapidly with freezing conditions expected.