Back in February we posted about Eclipse support for SIlverlight, and this week we announced a major milestone to tune Eclipse for WIndows 7. We're working with Tasktop technology to drive the project which will consist of developing updates to the Eclipse IDE that will incorporate new features available in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2. Check out the press pass article here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/oct09/10-28eclipsepr.mspx
A couple of great milestones this week related to code contribution. Yesterday (perhaps the shot heard around the world in terms of software interoperability), Microsoft, for the first time, released code - some 22K lines - to the Linux community for inclusion in the Linux kernel (nothing more on this, as I think the trade press has covered it pretty well). Likewise today, Microsoft has released a free live services plug-in to enable calendaring, email, and instant messaging for Moodle (an open-source course management system). Further, the plug-in enables single sign-on which fosters a more seemless experience for users. For more information, please see Peter Galli's post on Port 25.
Over the past few months, I, and several colleagues, hosted a number of CIO roundtables around the country for the Microsoft-Novell interoperability partnership. Here’s a video clip we pulled together…I’ve posted a full set over at our youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/moreinterop. Check out audience comments - great feedback!
I get a lot of questions about this, so I thought I would post a short clip that walks through Microsoft's virtualization project with Novell. This can also be viewed at moreinterop.com/hyperv. This link will open a new window: http://www.moreinterop.com/HyperV/video.html.
When I speak to an audience about Microsoft's partnership with Novell, I often frame the discussion around two themes: customer centricity and IP bridge building. The former deals with the fact that vendors should proactively work together to solve interoperability issues in the market (with partners and competitors alike), while the latter deals with a healthy respect for diverse business models and finding common ground on how to partner and work together. In the case of Novell, we worked through an innovative patent cooperation agreement that paved the way for healthy business and technical collaboration. The resulting partnership has yielded a number of technical innovations, a joint lab in Cambridge, MA, and has served hundreds of customers. While we continue to compete, we also acknowledge that this model is a successful one - - for the pragmatist IT community who needs to improve operational efficiency in their data center, cut costs, and get better support from their vendors - we are succeeding.
In a similar spirit of cooperation - this time to support the broader software ecosystem - Microsoft in partnership with the Linux Foundation, sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute, last week, expressing concerns over its draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. You can follow the link to download the letter, but to summarize briefly, there were concerns about 1) how the principles were drafted (apparently with little or no input from industry) and 2) proposed principles not supported by contract law.
As written, according to the Linux Foundation's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, the principles "interfere with the natural operation of open source licenses and commercial licenses as well by creating implied warranties that could result in a tremendous amount of unnecessary litigation, which would undermine the sharing of technology." Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, shares similar concerns at microsoftontheissues.com, stating that " certain provisions do not reflect existing law and could disrupt the well-functioning software market for businesses and consumers, as well as create uncertainty for software developers."
Our business models differ, ideologies sometimes differ, but we share, as Gutierrez states, a passion for software and a need to keep the industry from being inadvertently disrupted. There is power in such collaboration, and I am glad to see our organizations working together for the good of the vendor and developer community. Its true that we often find ourselves in competitive positions, but ensuring that we sustain a healthy, market-driven economy where the diversity of business models is honored and supported, is well worth the effort.
Check out Stephen McGibbon's blog for additional links and thoughts on how this might apply to the EU...
Just a few days ago, I wrote about the native
ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2. I use it everyday with my Novell colleagues and it makes our work go very smoothly (yes, they translate our docs sometimes, too!) At any rate, I was pleased to see this brief paper over at
Patrick Durusau's blog highlighting the value of ODF support in our Office Suite. Patrick is the OpenDocument editor for the OASIS technical committee. You can check out the
paper here.
I'm reading this over the weekend and wanted to pass it along. Sun and Microsoft have released a
white paper outlining how they are incorporating the SAML federation standard in their respective access management solutions. For more on SAML
click here. For details on Microsoft's 'Geneva' project, check out the
Forefront Blog.
Upcoming eSeminar from Ziff Davis featuring Microsoft and Novell. Register here - http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Virtualization/Microsoft052709/
...I actually got to share this with a customer last week. I attended a CIO Forum and was asked about compatibility between Microsoft Office and Open Office - his IT staff needed to share work-related files with a partner who used OO. He was pleasantly surprised to know that we had built in support for the OpenDocument Format with SP2. I also provided some background on how well the translators have worked for our team collaboration with Novell's staff.
Read the press pass interview about the release here.
I just pulled down the cumulative update for the SQL Server Driver for PHP (April 09 edition). For those of you who read my walk through for PHP connectivity to SQL Server 2005, the driver also supports SQL Server 2008. All steps are the same as my original walk through with the addition of a new dll file and an additional extension configuration in the php.ini file. More information on PHP and SQL Server can be found here at the sqlphp blog.
The much awaited Silverlight plug-in for Linux (aka 'Moonlight') operating systems was released by Novell yesterday. Read the MSN
article here, see the
press release here, and finally - if applicable - download the plug-in
here.
I'm excited to share that Dell just launched their solutions portal for hardware and service offerings that support the Microsoft-Novell Interoperability partnership. Briefly, as part of Dell's own efforts to help customers reduce complexity and improve performance in the data center, customers can purchase a preconfigured Dell box that includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as an optimized guest on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. In today's economic climate, these are great tools to help customers more quickly realize efficiencies and reduce costs for their mixed environments. Please visit dell.com/interop to learn more.
If you work with documents, images, blogs, or other digital information, you are probably familiar with tagging. Keywords, or meta data, can be used to describe the information in question (a file, unstructured data, etc) which later helps indexing and searching. The following is a slightly different take on tagging that promises to foster new experiences in interactive mobility. By using coded images (think barcodes) and a small app in a camera-equipped smartphone, users can interact directly with their environment, in real-time, to receive new information, or find new experiences, through their device.
As the FAQ states, anything from billboards, to product packages, to business cards, can be equipped with such an image. As a simple use case, imagine reading a tag on someone's business card, then being shown - on your device - a small videocast describing that person's business. Or perhaps someone who is visually impaired can tag a product to 'hear' a description rather than having to read a small font on a box. The scenario's are endless...I see tremendous potential from a marketing, usability, and even transaction processing perspective. As it concerns interoperability, I see great value in the fact that we are simplifying the transaction between the device and surrounding infrastructure through a discrete and 'simple-to-deploy' component pair. The software is available for most devices today and the tags will be deployed in various media by anyone who wants to use them. The tags won't care what 'reads them' and the devices won't care what produces the tag (screen, paper, etc).
The Tag service is in beta today. For more information, check out the website here: http://www.microsoft.com/tag. If you want to try it out, by the way, visit the site to grab the app. I've created a test tag here that loads my personal blog into your mobile web browser...
For those of you following the Novell partnership, you know that we have been working on a plug-in that enables Linux users to consume Silverlight media. Here is a related project around Silverlight interoperability for Eclipse posted by JC Cimetiere on the Microsoft Interoperability Blog. Briefly this is an open source project to improve interoperability between Silverlight and Java. JC walks you through the classic 'Hello World' followed by Silverlight communicating with a Java-based web service. Here is the walk-through from youtube.com/interopbydesign.
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