First, an introduction is in order. My name is Craig Kitterman and I am a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft focused solely on interoperability. That's right, Microsoft has people committed solely to interoperability – this commitment is not a 'flash in the pan'. In order to effectively address the interoperability issues that our customers, partners and the development community are facing, we must engage in regular dialog. I am very much looking forward to our first meeting of the Interoperability Customer Executive Council next week here in Redmond. This will be an amazing opportunity to engage directly with a number of customers and learn about their interoperability challenges. With this information we can continue to identify areas for improvement in our products and work with the community to improve the interoperability ecosystem.

In addition to the customer council, I am going to be reaching out directly to developers, architects and IT pros who deal with interoperability issues on a daily basis. I think of you as the 'troops on the ground' – the folks who are tasked with actually dealing with these issues, and are usually the first people to raise these issues within your organization. This is a very different conversation than one we can have with CIOs and CTOs, and in my opinion is just as critical to our long term vision of interoperability. Over the next several months, I will be constructing a community consisting of several Microsoft and non-Microsoft folks who will be blogging regularly on interoperability subjects – including specific technical solutions. These posts will be aggregated and available publicly via the Microsoft interoperability website (I will post here when this is available). I strongly encourage you to read these posts, comment on them, and really engage with the people doing this to get your opinion into our collective consciousness, so we can address the issues that are critical to you and your organization. The value of the community will continue to grow over time the more you are engaged. Stay tuned…