Craig Kitterman's Interoperability Community Blog : Tech Interop

Introducing the Microsoft Interoperability Team Blog

craigkitterman — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:21:00 GMT

It has been a long while since I have posted, as I have been busy working with the global Microsoft community, helping re-scope/expand our efforts around delivering relevant interoperability solutions between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies worldwide. We recognize that effective interoperability is a key component of efficiency – enabling improved leverage of IT assets – which is now more important than ever.

We (the Microsoft interoperability team) have launched a new team blog where we will post updates on many of the technical projects that are underway to address real market needs. I am also really hoping that this blog can be used to gather great feedback from you in terms of the things we should be focused on. The ultimate goal of course is to be pragmatic and practical to maximize the impact of everything we do for our customers who live in the reality of today's heterogeneous IT environment.

Please check out http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability to read the introduction by Jean Paoli and bookmark for future updates.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you here AND there.

Cheers,

-C

Interop Las Vegas 2008 – Day 2

craigkitterman — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:22:00 GMT

Day 2 was all about Partners – those who we are working with through the Interop Vendor Alliance as well as a host of companies building solutions that interoperate with Microsoft NAP technology.

Video: Interop Las Vegas 2008 - Day 2

-C

Interop Las Vegas 2008 – Day 1

craigkitterman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:57:00 GMT

I am not Ryan Seacrest. With that in mind, here is a quick recap of Tuesday's activities at Interop Las Vegas.

Video: Interop Las Vegas 2008 - Day 1

Thanks to Grant Williams and Jessica Evans for putting the video together!

UPDATE: You can now watch Bob Muglia's Interop Las Vegas keynote online here.

Information Cards in PHP made easy!

craigkitterman — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:53:56 GMT

Developers can now integrate InfoCards into their PHP-based web projects using the recently released Zend Framework v1.5 with the Zend_InfoCard 1.5 library component. Documentation on Information Card integration can be found here. For more information about Information Cards and the identity metasystem, check out Kim Cameron's Identity Blog.

Document Interoperability Roundtables & Labs - Take 2: Seoul, Korea

craigkitterman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:40:00 GMT

The discussion continued Wednesday the 12th in Seoul, when we sat down with representatives from KANOi, Wooam, ECO and Tomotec. Through these discussions we learned that there are a number of very interesting products in the Korean market that are currently taking advantage of open standards-based document formats. Discussion Wednesday centered primarily on DAISY and Open XML. Vijay took some of his allocated time to demonstrate the ODF translation work being done on Source Forge and showcased how this can be implemented in centralized or distributed scenarios. The discussion was active considering the language barrier and I believe that seeing cross-format translation working in real world scenarios was eye opening to the folks in the room; my sense what that many will be moving forward with ODF and additional format implementations in the near future as well to broaden their offerings and provide greater choice.

Windows Live Spaces

I was excited to learn that the team at Tomotec was already working with the beta Open XML to DAISY translator for their fascinating DAISY reader product. They will be a great showcase for this open source work and have committed to helping test future versions and actively participating in the Source Forge project.

General feedback we received on community needs to improve implementation quality (leading to better interop):

It would be great to have a developer friendly authoring tool that provides real-time WYSIWYG rendering – developers should not have to use MS Office (or other office package) to validate output
The community needs to collaborate to develop a "trusted" source of documents. This would be a common library of documents that encapsulate the gamut of capability in each format and can be tested against using batch or manual processes.
For Open XML, there was a request for better authoring and development tools for working with documents that include data based on custom defined schemas.

On the event itself:

We need to spend time at the beginning of each event to recap the activities, discussions and action items from previous Document Interoperability events so that the discussion can continue to build & evolve.
We need to increase the amount of technical collaboration and discussion so that vendors can understand at a deeper level; depending on the # of companies, 1 day may not be enough:
- Some vendors would like to do deep-dive peer architectural reviews
- A discussion of challenges and opportunities from all points of view would assist in cross pollination of ideas and solutions
Future (or regular ongoing?) follow up engagement with regional groups would be useful
Overall, a great way to share ideas and improve interoperability between products

The next event in Germany in April will take all of this feedback into account and will hopefully result in an ever richer experience for all participants. This event is not meant to be specific to Germany and we are really looking forward to bringing in participants from all over Europe to make this a truly pan-European discussion. If your company is interested in participating, please email me.

Additional events are currently being planned now in other locations around the world and have been discussing about another US event as well. Feedback on locations etc. is always welcome as well.

Document Interoperability Roundtables & Labs - Take 1: Cambridge, MA

craigkitterman — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:51:00 GMT

As announced yesterday, this week represents the kick-off in a series of technical labs and roundtable discussions that we will be driving focused solely on interoperability between open standards based document formats, including ODF, UOF, Open XML and others. The location selected for round 1 was Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Video: Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) - Cambridge, MA

The second goal (of equal importance) was to discuss how we as a community can work together improve the overall quality of implementation thereby improving interoperability. The questions that were discussed (note: this is an initial set and are really working to see how this can be improved) were the following:

What document interoperability issues exist with your product today?
Where and how should we collaborate as a community to solve issues?
What tools, test suites, sample document libraries etc. will enable developers to better implement open standards-based formats?
What types of templates should be created that can be optimized for interoperability across formats?
Where are customers demanding interoperability? (applications, formats, platforms)
What other questions should we be asking/discussing in future roundtables?

Some common themes that emerged from the discussion are:

Customers want high fidelity with no data loss
We need to carefully consider both presentation/authoring/exchange scenarios AND enterprise server scenarios (back office, unstructured data, schema across supply chains)
Test suites are critical to ensure quality, reduce development time
- We need to think creatively to solve this; these could be desktop, web or web-service based etc.
Speed of document rendering is important to customers (esp. in mobile) and view and edit modes may need to be treated differently to accommodate.
Access to an accepted library of quality test documents is a gap.

I am very happy with the outcome of these discussions and the technical engagement for the first go-around. This credit goes to the great set of partners who participated and their willingness to really collaborate on this key issue. We have a lot of work to do and will continue to evolve the approach to ensure maximum benefit for all the participating companies and their customers. The next stop on this "train" is Seoul, Korea next week where we will bring in another handful of ISVs with common goals of improved document format interoperability, then on to Germany in early April.

I want to call out here that this is open to any vendors who are implementing open standards based document formats and are interested in working with a broader set of folks with common goals. If you are interested in participating, please feel free to contact me directly (ckitter@microsoft.com) and we can work together to see how to integrate your company, product and ideas into the next session.

If you cannot participate directly in one of the events but would like to add your comments as to what kinds of things we can and should do as a community in the interest of document interoperability, please feel free to comment or shoot me email.

DreamSpark Program – Free Software for students and a GREAT demonstration of Interoperability

craigkitterman — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:04:00 GMT

How do you ensure that somebody, someplace in the world is actually a student (so you can give 'em free software)? This is the challenge that these gentlemen sat down to solve. Through the combined use of Open Source and Microsoft technologies, they have figured out an elegant way to get enrollment verification information. This is a great showcase of the power of interoperability to solve problems, leveraging the strengths of Microsoft products in conjunction with other technologies.

Microsoft Office Binary Formats – now freely available to all!

craigkitterman — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 07:42:48 GMT

This afternoon we published the specs for the office binary document formats and placed them under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. This means that anyone can now freely use these formats for any reason without any concerns over intellectual property rights.

Enjoy!

More information on the Imagine Cup Interoperability Award

craigkitterman — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:35:00 GMT

In the latest Channel8 video, my colleague Vijay Rajagopalan has some good info here about how the entries will be judged, and how he thinks about technical interoperability in the context of identity and the Imagine Cup theme of the environment. If you don't know him, Vijay is an interesting and very funny guy – but doesn't mess around when it comes to architecture J

More details on Interop Track @ XML 2007 Conference

craigkitterman — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:17:47 GMT

We have secured a number of great well-known speakers from the industry to help lead the discussions at this year's XML 2007 conference! It will be a fun event and hopefully an enlightening one as well.

The current schedule & speaker list for the Dec 4 sessions is as follows:

09:00 - Document Interop: Ecma Office Open XML and OASIS ODF
- Speakers: Miguel de Icaza (Novell Inc.), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft)
11:00 - Enterprise Interop: Identity and XML
- Speakers: Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft)
14:00 - Web Interop: Ajax with XML and JSON
- Speakers: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft)
16:00 - Interop Round Table & Happy Hour – Development Discussion on Interop and XML. (Hors d'oeuvres and drinks hosted by Microsoft).
- Speakers: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Miguel de Icaza (Novell), Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Zend), Shyam Pather (Microsoft), Vijay Rajagopalan (Microsoft), Craig Kitterman (Microsoft)

I am really looking forward to meeting a lot of passionate XML gurus and sharing some great technical discussion! See you in Boston.

Microsoft Sponsoring Interoperability Track at XML 2007

craigkitterman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:48:32 GMT

IDEAlliance yesterday announced that Microsoft will be sponsoring an interoperability track at this year's XML 2007 conference in Boston, MA Dec 3-6 (interop track taking place Tuesday the 4^th). Details about the sessions can be found in the press release.

It is going to be a great collection of sessions and I really encourage folks to attend this intimate conference to get the low down on what is happening at the core of the XML community. I am really hoping to get a broad and diverse group of folks to come and talk real-world interoperability on the web, in the document realm, and in the enterprise; this is why we are inviting folks from Yahoo!, Zend, Novell and others to join us. I hope you can too.

I will update you here as soon as we have more speaker names that we can announce…

Microsoft launches www.microsoft.com/opensource

craigkitterman — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:21:00 GMT

Today at OSCON, Microsoft announced a new website on Microsoft.com that outlines our perspective and strategy regarding the Open Source development methodology. Here you will be able to find information about a wide variety of ways that Microsoft is partnering with the Open Source community and leveraging the benefits of the Open Source development model in some key interoperability projects.

Learn more about Open Source related activities at the following sites:

Port 25 – Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft
Codeplex – Microsoft's open source project hosting site
Shared Source – Microsoft's set of programs for sharing source code with customers, partners, governments, researchers, etc.
Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum – offer for OSS ISVs through Microsoft Partner Program

Java Open XML API Project officially launched!

craigkitterman — Thu, 31 May 2007 23:19:00 GMT

The Java API library project started by Julien Chable (Wygwam France) has officially launched at http://www.openxml4j.org. Java developers now have a nice set of methods which will allow them to create rich Open XML documents for consumption by office productivity software or line of business systems in far fewer lines of code.

This is a great demonstration of the cross-language and cross-platform capabilities of the Open XML format. I have already seen a few great solutions implemented in Java that enable the use of custom schemas in Open XML to move data between nodes in a value chain, consuming and manipulating this custom business data inside and outside of traditional office document editing systems.

Nice work Julien! I look forward to the continued improvement and evolution as the Java community embraces these APIs.

Welcome Adam Wiener to the Blogosphere!

craigkitterman — Wed, 30 May 2007 03:35:22 GMT

I would like to welcome my colleague Adam Wiener to the blogosphere. Adam is a XML and data guru and is currently driving some great interoperability work in the identity space that he will be discussing regularly (I hope) on his blog. Please take a moment to stop by, drop a comment, and grab an RSS feed.

Interop Las Vegas: T-minus one week!

craigkitterman — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:29:07 GMT

I am looking forward Interop Las Vegas next week at the Mandalay Bay convention center. Microsoft will have a large footprint in the expo hall and will also be featuring a keynote on Wednesday by Bob Muglia and a few other session speakers (including yours truly). All the Microsoft activity at the show can be followed on our interop LV page at http://www.interop.com/microsoft_ilv/, and here on this blog.

This event represents the culmination of a great year of interoperability activity and focus across Microsoft. But this is just the beginning. I am really excited about having the opportunity to meet thousands of IT Pros over the course of the week and learn more from them about the challenges that they are facing today. Our goal as an IT vendor is not only to provide strategic business value to our customers, but to make the lives of IT professionals easier in the process, allowing them to focus on higher and higher value activities. We will continue this mission, working tirelessly to solve interoperability problems so our customers don't have to.

Please stop by booth #1548 and say "hi".

See you in Vegas!