Craig Kitterman's Interoperability Community Blog : access

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

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!

Microsoft to release .NET Framework Source Code

craigkitterman — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:02:58 GMT

I saw this today and it inspired me to really get back on the blogging horse: Scott Guthrie reported yesterday that with .NET 3.5, Microsoft will begin releasing source code for the .NET framework including debug support in Visual Studio 2008. This means that developers can actually step into code that resides inside the base-class (and other) framework libraries to see how things are implemented, track your object state etc.

This will not only be a lot of fun, but will be educational for developers to look at the guts of the framework. I am really looking forward to playing with this…

Pragmatism in IT

craigkitterman — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:00:45 GMT

The approach of Microsoft in the context of interoperability is one of proactivity and pragmatism. The reality of the IT ecosystem is that heterogeneity is reality and that we as a company (and an industry) must continually adapt to properly address the needs of customers operating in these environments. True interoperability can only be achieved through this pragmatic approach. There is no silver bullet and we must work closely with our customers and partners to understand what their real needs are in order to build solutions, and partner with the industry to effectively solve them.

Standardization is often a great tool in building a common bridge which everyone can cross. There are a few different types of standards including those submitted to formal standards bodies, as well as "de facto" or industry standards. Both serve an important role in providing interoperability, but should not be viewed as the one-size-fits-all solution.

By working directly with the community, we are able to foster interoperability in a very direct way, that meets the needs of the market and our customers where they are today. Often through the interaction and collaboration with partners (like those in the Interop Vendor Alliance) we are able to build bridges between innovative technologies quickly responding to real needs and providing shared customer benefit.

IT evolves at such a rapid pace and we must be agile in order to innovate at the pace required by the market and our customers. Over the past several months, one thing has become very clear to me (perhaps I am a little slow in the uptake here): IT Professionals really don't care about marketing, politics and idealistic debate – they just want stuff to WORK and drive strategic business value. They also don't want to have to make it work themselves – it is the responsibility of the vendors to work together to enable interoperability so they don't have to. I had the opportunity to speak with several IT Professionals at TechX World in San Francisco on Tuesday and this message was repeated loud and clear through and after our panel discussion.

I am looking forward to continuing to meet and engage with more and more customers and partners in the near future to really learn about your pain. We are fully committed to listening and understanding your issues. By then taking this input and engineering interoperability into our products by design, engaging deeply with the community, making Microsoft intellectual property available, and by embracing and participating in standards setting activities, we will to continue to foster pragmatic interoperability between Microsoft and non-Microsoft products and technologies.

Sun to support Open XML

craigkitterman — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:18:00 GMT

I just ran across these links today. Great to see additional implementations of Open XML coming online!

Nikon RAW (.NEF) codec released for Windows Vista!

craigkitterman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:52:00 GMT

For those of us who shoot digital SLR photography and love Windows Vista, this is a great day. The Nikon NEF codec will allow us to leverage the great Photo Gallery features of Vista, even with our non-jpeg files.

Shooting RAW vs. shooting JPEG is an ongoing debate between many amateur photographers, but when I am shooting something that I hope to frame, may need to edit, want the utmost in dynamic range, and can't risk compression artifacts of any kind, I switch my D70 to RAW. The problem has always been that when I just want to index, view and share these pictures along with my 10,000+ JPEG images in windows, I need to do one of two things:

Shoot RAW + JPEG – this will give me a low res JPEG as well as the RAW. Low res??? This doesn't fly for me when I am doing a Media Center slideshow on my 1080p panel, and besides, who wants two files with the same image floating around on their machine in different formats?
Shoot RAW only – this would require using editing software to laboriously convert my RAW image to JPEG, leaving me with a high res image in both formats, but we are back to the two file conundrum.

This new codec based on the Windows Imaging Components (WIC) architecture, and will allow (as I understand it) for RAW files to be treated in the same way in the Vista Photo Gallery, allowing for viewing and sorting of images based on several dimensions of meta tagging. I hope it will also work from a Media Center Extender device (Xbox 360) for viewing and managing RAW photos as well…

This is a great example of providing customers with interoperability through technology access. By publishing and making available the WIC specifications, Nikon is able to deliver this powerful capability to its customers and provide seamless interoperability with Windows Vista.

You can download the codec directly from here.

Open Specification Promise (OSP) on Channel9!

craigkitterman — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 04:34:00 GMT

For those of you who are not yet intimately familiar with the Open Specification Promise (OSP), this is a great video featuring my manager Jean Paoli discussing the ins and outs of the OSP (along with Amy Marasco and Tom Robertson). If you tune into Channel9 now, you will see Jean's mug front and center on the main page. If you check back later, you will want to go directly to the story here.

This story underscores the simplicity and beauty of the OSP. They discuss several specific scenarios and how the OSP promises allowance for developers in each case using clear and simple language. For more information on the OSP or to see the up-to-date list of specifications covered by it, click here.

Ecma Office Open XML added to the OSP

craigkitterman — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:54:26 GMT

Today we added Ecma Office Open XML final draft to the list of specifications covered by the OSP. Now users who implement solutions based on the Open XML format can choose to use either the language of the Covenant Not to Sue (CNS) or the language provided by the recently announced Open Specification Promise (OSP). The rights assigned both agreements are substantially the same, but since legal language can be very detailed, we wanted to be sure that users have both options. A number of industry legal experts have expressed their satisfaction with both approaches to the language so the result is that implementers should be comfortable leveraging these formats without fear of any future patent claim assertion by MS.

How I define (and think about) Interoperability

craigkitterman — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:50:59 GMT

When I think about IT (and business for that matter), the interactions that result from useful connections are the primary generators of value. To put it another way, if connections can't be made, value cannot be transferred from one person to another, or from one system or application to another and remains trapped and useless. Hiring the most intelligent person on the planet does you no good if he/she cannot communicate with the rest of your team. Likewise the most advanced piece of technology will only help if it can be leveraged by the rest of your infrastructure, including your existing data and systems. Since heterogeneity is reality, interoperability must exist to enable these connections.

Interoperability is connecting people, data and diverse systems. Microsoft's approach to interoperability is to achieve it "by design" – meaning that we strive for greater product connectivity 'out of the box'. Design includes not only product engineering, but also includes community collaboration (customers, partners, and competitors), providing access to our technologies through licensing, the OSP, and translation tools, and by implementing thousands of standards in our products, and engaging in hundreds of standards-setting activities.

Microsoft participates actively in each of the above methods for achieving interoperability by design. Specific examples of each can be found on the Microsoft interoperability website at http://www.microsoft.com/inteorp. I personally have an ongoing commitment to ensure that we are providing useful examples and references to resources that help address real interoperability issues. If there are specific topic areas missing, please let me know!

Microsoft releases Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format under the Open Specification Promise (OSP)

craigkitterman — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:35:00 GMT

Today we announced that the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format is now freely available for use under our Open Specification Promise (OSP), and can be used in any development model without license for free, and forever. This decision was the result of many conversations over the last several months with our customers, partners and the open source community. By adding the VHD to the list of specs covered by the OSP, we hope to expand the virtualization market and foster interoperability among all virtualization solutions.

As part of Microsoft's ongoing commitment to interoperability, we will continue to evaluate our broad list of specifications and consider them for use within the OSP model. We welcome feedback on this subject, as discussion with the community is critical to our vision of interoperability.