Craig Kitterman's Interoperability Community Blog : events

Imagine Cup 2008: Interoperability Award Winner – Team SKAN of India!

craigkitterman — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:31:51 GMT

I just walked out of the finals ceremony at Imagine Cup 2008; what an amazing experience. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate each of the three finalist teams in the 2008 Interoperability Award including Team Together (Poland), Team Ecologix (Brazil) and the Grand Prize winner: Team SKAN (India).

It was a difficult decision for the judging panel and each team should be incredibly proud of their achievement! I hope to see you all again next year at Imagine Cup 2009 in Egypt!

Cheers!

-C

[I will update this post with photos and videos as they become available]

Imagine Cup – Interoperability Award Finalists

craigkitterman — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:57:13 GMT

I am a couple weeks late on this one as I have been traveling, but I would like to congratulate Team Ecologix (Brazil), Team SKAN (India), and Team Together (Poland) – our 3 finalist teams for the 2008 Imagine Cup Interoperability Award!

These 3 teams will be invited to Paris, France next month for the Imagine Cup finals where the Interoperability Award Grand Prize will be awarded!

All three projects are great examples of real-world interoperability and demonstrate the flexibility of the Microsoft technologies. I am really looking forward to meeting everyone and learning more about the motivations behind each of the projects.

See you in Paris!

-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.

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.

XML 2007 Day 1

craigkitterman — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:47:42 GMT

Despite missing 2 flights yesterday (one – snow in my driveway, and one - United Airlines "issue"), I arrived here bright and early at 7:00 am this morning (14 hours later than planned) on 4 hours of sleep (5 hours less than planned).

The joint Microsoft / Interop Vendor Alliance booth is up and running and already had a handful of great conversations with folks during lunch & happy hour this evening. I even had the fortune of running into and chatting for a bit with Sam Hiser and John Gøtze. I hope to run into them again during our roundtable discussions tomorrow.

I heard rave reviews of the Mark Logic session delivered this afternoon by Matthew Turner on Open XML interoperability with the Mark Logic product. I was unable to attend the session but I stopped by their booth to get caught up. Matt and John Kreisa kindly talked me through it again and I must say that this is one of the most compelling demos that I have seen as of late that really takes advantage of the Open XML format including deep custom schema integration. I hope to be able to work with Matt & John make this demo more widely visible as it a great showcase for the power of Open XML as well as great product interop.

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…

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!

EU Roundtables on Open XML Interoperability

craigkitterman — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 21:37:00 GMT

Next week I will be discussing with folks across Europe the benefits of Open XML and the interoperability of XML based file formats. On Monday I will be in Germany hosting a roundtable at the Technischen Universität München (Technical University of Munich) with students and faculty.

On Wednesday, I will be in Ghent, Belgium at the Developer & IT Pro days event with my colleague Doug Mahugh. We will be hosting a roundtable in the morning and Doug will be delivering one of his great deep dive sessions on Office Open XML Development in the afternoon.

I am really looking forward to these discussions. I hope to gain additional insight into how folks in the EU are thinking about document format interoperability and what it really means to them considering the current landscape of ODF and Open XML. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop by and say hi.

Tech Ed: Developers - A Success

craigkitterman — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:40:55 GMT

I had a great meeting Friday afternoon here in Barcelona with several great developers working hard on interoperability in their respective areas of technology including VC++, C#, Visual Studio Team System, and Open XML. These folks are excited about participation in the Interoperability community by blogging, participating in events/webcasts, and by providing regular feedback on Microsoft interoperability efforts. The community is starting to reach critical mass, and I am currently shooting for an early December launch of the blog aggregator on microsoft.com/interop.

The expo floor was surprisingly busy for the last day of the conference (and a Friday).

I had a great chat with Doug Mahugh (seen here explaining the benefits of open document formats) who mentioned that there is really a lot of great work going on in the developer community around Open XML – even beyond the great work that is happening on the OpenXMLDeveloper.org site. In fact, he put me in touch with a couple of the developers from France with whom he spoke who have participated in building some of the great solutions on the MSDN France website. One of the fellows I met was Julien Chable, who has a great Java Open XML sample demonstrating cross-platform interoperability.

Bob and Ajay had some great conversations at the Protocol Licensing booth over the week as ISVs continue to recognize Access to Microsoft IP as one of the many ways to achieve seamless interoperability with their solutions.

I am sticking around for IT Forum this week as well, and will be blogging sporadically. Stay tuned for comments on feedback received from IT Pros on my Open XML Interoperability chalk & talk, as well as some other interoperability news…

Interoperability @ Tech Ed, IT Forum in Barcelona

craigkitterman — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:53:00 GMT

We are less than two weeks from Tech Ed Europe and just over 2 weeks to IT Forum. There are a couple of interoperability community things happening in Barcelona that I would like to share with you. First, I will be holding a side meeting with Architects and Developers at Tech Ed, and with IT Professionals at IT Forum to discuss the Microsoft interoperability community. I am building a roster of folks who are subject matter experts in various topics of technical interoperability, and who blog (or are willing to blog) regularly on the subject. The objective is to build a library of useful technical interoperability articles & discussions from folks all over the world who face similar challenges - see my blog post on the community here. If you are interested in participating in this discussion, please let me know.

Additionally, I will be delivering a Chalk & Talk at IT Forum with a focus on Office Open XML interoperability. I will quickly cover the format and demonstrate some interesting IT scenarios that showcase the interoperability capability of this new xml based format (offered by the Microsoft Office System 2007). The Chalk & Talk format is great and will also allow me learn about your view of interoperability for IT, and to get your feedback around Microsoft's approach to interoperability.

More interesting things will be happening as well – additional information to come at a later date. Stay tuned, and I will see you in Spain!