Daniel Ingitaraj (DPE, Singapore)

Building Bridges - Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and On the Wire

ingitaraj — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:03:58 GMT

Why Build Bridges? I would say it is safe to think that Microsoft is going to continue shipping Windows, and Red Hat and Novell will continue shipping Linux. With companies like Wall Mart, Southwest Airlines, City of Los Angeles ( Ref: Microsoft and Novell...(read more)

Interoperability by Design - Connecting people, data and diverse systems.

ingitaraj — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:58:42 GMT

(Products, Community, Access & Standards) I. Products: Novell extending to Windows management: An Internetnews.com article reports how Novell, a well-known Linux vendor and Microsoft partner, has ambitions to become a Windows management vendor. Recently...(read more)

OPEN XML Getting Adoption

ingitaraj — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:28:10 GMT

It is great to see the momentum behind ECMA OPEN XML. What is impressive with this list below is the number of applications on other platforms besides Windows. The Latest news was iPHONE using OPEN XML for reading documents and Neo Office suite for Mac....(read more)

Interoperability by Design - Part II (Connecting People, Connecting Data and Connecting Diverse Systems)

ingitaraj — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 09:04:27 GMT

Here’s where we used to be when it came to interoperability. 1980 was the best of times and it was the worst of times. It was the best of times in that, as long as you stayed with the products of a single vendor, you could be reasonably certain that everything in your infrastructure would work together, from the solutions and applications down through the operating system, computers, and other hardware.

But the price for this type of interoperability was too high. Customers were locked into a single vendor’s solution, a single vendor’s technology—and a single vendor’s prices. Because few vendors could truly meet all the needs of their customers, those customers started adding solutions from other vendors—and built the “smokestack” or “silo” systems with which many customers are still saddled. They built towers of Babel within their own organizations—systems that couldn’t talk to each other or share information. And, of course, as soon as a company tried to share information with others, it ran into this same problem of interoperability. These systems did what they were designed to do very well. They just weren’t designed to do interoperability

Today, of course, interoperability exists at each of these levels. It has to. Customers are not going to return to the restrictions and high prices of single-vendor environments. That means that any vendor that wants to play in today’s marketplace must support interoperability. The evolution of single-vendor environments into multi-vendor environments adds an entirely new layer of complexity to IT environments. Moreover, how interoperability is achieved is left to the vendor, and different vendors offer different ways to interoperate and different degrees of interoperability, which adds yet another layer of complexity to the IT environment.

As consumers, companies and governments look for new ways to use technology—for new forms of entertainment, new means of competitive and strategic advantage, and new ways to address public policy needs—they will require more connectedness, more interoperability. The quantity and nature of the connection points will increase and those connection points will encompass types of interoperability we haven’t seen before.

With the requirements of interoperability so multifaceted, it should be no surprise that the way to achieve interoperability is equally multifaceted. We believe that interoperability must be achieved by design, and that that design includes four key elements: product engineering, community outreach, access to technology, and standard-setting engagements.

1. Products : The “products” component is about building interoperability into products so that they are interoperable out of the box. This requires everything from documenting protocols, data formats, and APIs, through providing complimentary tools to enhance interoperability. For example, all of Microsoft’s key products include publicly available resource kits, controls, SDKs, DDKs, and connectors to promote interoperability. All of these products are designed to be more than interoperable—they’re designed to promote opportunities for interoperability. In the case of Windows, there are more than 50,000 application providers building products that work with our software. There are more than 100,000 hardware devices that work with Windows. That’s interoperability.

Some Examples:

Microsoft Not a Cathedral; Open Source Not a Bazaar (ASP.NET AJAX works on Linux)

PHP on Vista with IIS7 ; PHP on IIS7 w/FastCGI

2. Community : As those numbers suggest, the community for Windows-based products is vast. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when we seek ever broader ways to work with others, through industry collaborations, partner programs, training and certification, even collaborations with companies that are sometimes our competitors. In the past year we’ve announced quite a few collaborations with companies that otherwise compete with us, such as JBoss, Sun, SugarCRM, XenSource, and the OpenSource providers. We collaborate with our competitors because it’s in our customer’s interest that we do so. We want Windows customers to be successful using whatever technologies they want to use.

Other vendors aren’t the only members of the interoperability community. An important new development to promote interoperability is the Microsoft Interoperability Community Executive Council. It’s composed of customers throughout the economy and government and will convene every six months. It will provide yet another way for us to listen to customers on this issue.

Some Examples: One-page Java-to-.NET Interop cheat sheet

Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC ; Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin ;

Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab – Sneak Peek; Microsoft Forms Interoperability Council

Leading Identity Management Vendors Join Microsoft to Demonstrate Federated Identity Using Web Services

3: Access : Hand in hand with community outreach is the issue of providing that community with access to Microsoft technologies so that they can build interoperable solutions of their own. This is nothing new for Microsoft. We’ve made our source code publicly available for years so that others can create complimentary products. More recently, our Open Specification Promise is a way to address the legal issues surrounding interoperability – it’s a way to put a structure around our technology to make it available to everyone who wants to build a complimentary product, so they know they can do so without concern for patent infringement.

Under this agreement, we’ve released technologies as diverse as Web services specifications, Sender ID, and the new virtual hard disk image format specification. We also make our technology accessible in specific arrangements with other vendors. For example, we’ve licensed ActiveSync technology to Nokia so that its customers can access their Exchange Server e-mail from their Nokia phones. There’s no standard involved here—it’s our technology. But we made it available to Nokia because our common customers are the winners.

Eg : Microsoft Open Specification Promise

4. Standards : We ship more than 500 different products every year and all of them support relevant standards. Our deep engagement with the standards-setting organizations, consortia, SIGS, and other groups involves hundreds of dedicated employees. And the work of implementing standards involves thousands more. Standards are, of course, a crucial component of achieving interoperability. We believe in standards. We work with hundreds of standards-setting organizations and support thousands of standards in our products.

Standards@ Microsoft : Microsoft products and technologies support hundreds of technical standards such as FTP, HTTP, IMAP, IP, IPSec, Kerberos protocol, POP3, LU 6.2 protocol, MIME, SNA, SOAP, SSL, SNMP, TCP, TLS, UDP, WSDL, WS-*, and XML.
Microsoft is actively engaged with more than 100 standards-setting organizations and workgroups such as ECMA, ETSI, OASIS, OMA, IEEE, IETF, ISO/IEC JTC1, ITU, and W3C.
Microsoft engineers have authored or co-authored dozens of industry specifications and standards such as .NET CLI, C# CLI, XML, SOAP, WSDL, MTOM, UDDI, WS-Addressing, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Management, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-I Basic Profile.
Microsoft is working with industry to define a new generation of software and Web services based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

Eg; Identity Theft Prevention and Identity Management Standards Panel

This work is only going to grow, for us and for the industry, because as new technologies emerge, and as solutions become increasingly multi-layered, the number and type of standards we need will increase. But there’s an important difference between how Microsoft views standards and how some others view standards. Some say that standards alone are the way to interoperability. I hope I’ve demonstrated that we believe in standards too—but standards don’t create interoperability. They only help to create the opportunity for interoperability. How standards are implemented through product engineering, community outreach, and technology access is crucial.

There’s been a long-term trajectory to Microsoft’s approach to interoperability. A key point in our approach came with our shared source code program back in 2001. But it’s grown rapidly over the years, and especially so over the past year.

With Microsoft’s increased commitment comes an increased promise: To remain true to the principles I’ve outlined here for helping our customers access their data and bridge disparate technologies.

To enable interoperability by design through product engineering, community outreach, enabling access to Microsoft technology, and through standards engagements.
To work with anyone, anywhere—including our competitors—for the benefit of our customers.

Interoperability by Design - Part I (Connecting People, Connecting Data and Connecting Diverse Systems)

ingitaraj — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:06:02 GMT

I have been talking about Interoperability last few months and have to say in summary - for 4 people I have met, I have discovered 5 different definitions and views about Interoperability. So pause for a moment if SOA and Web 2.0 have multiple definitions and views, time to add Interoperability to the mix of often less understood, over communicated and misrepresented words.

I thought of looking at the issue of interoperability from a variety of perspectives. But first why should we care about interoperability—and why.

Interoperability matters to everyone—in different ways. What it means to you depends on the type of organization or group to which you belong and the type of problem you’re trying to solve. Of course, at its core, interoperability is about getting technologies to work together—once you cross this differences crop!!

Read Interoperability: what's in a name? — Doug Mahugh for another interesting perspective.

Consumers want to be able to take their music player, plug it into their computer, and get their music – regardless of who makes each device and what software they run. They want to use whichever scanner or printer they can get a great deal on, whichever camera or pocket device they get as a present. And they want those devices to work with their computers four years from now, even though they may have changed computers twice in the interim (viola)

Enterprise customers have a more complex way of looking at interoperability. It’s about solutions from different vendors working together—because, for enterprise customers, vendor interoperability means vendor choice. And vendor choice means the flexibility to adopt the solutions they want regardless of where those solutions originate. Vendor choice also means the ability to adopt the most cost-effective solutions, and the ability to negotiate lower prices to help reduce total cost of ownership. Vendor choice isn’t just a good idea—for many companies, it’s a requirement of their procurement policies. This isn’t just an issue within companies. It’s a major issue among companies that want to work together in consortia, virtual organizations, distribution or supply chains, or other forms of organization.

Customers want interoperability and their vendors want to give them what they want. But for the companies that sell the solutions that must interoperate, interoperability is both a blessing and a curse—and, thus, a source of some tension.

1. The Blessing: Interoperability can create market opportunities for vendors if their products work with, and add value to, the solutions that customers already have or want to buy.
2. On the other hand, enabling that interoperability means using standard or commodity components rather than proprietary components that may add greater value to the solution. It means trading competitive advantage for playing nicely with others.
Both are worthwhile goals and there can be legitimate differences of opinion about when and where one makes that tradeoff. Another concern for vendors is that standards, despite their clear value, can impede innovation. No product was ever born from standard-setting activities.

Interoperability means different things to different people – so how do we define it? Here’s a simple definition that gets more complicated the more you examine it: Interoperability means connecting people, data, and diverse systems.

“Connecting people” focuses on the workflows, the collaborations, and the knowledge sharing that take place within and among organizations at the level of social or interpersonal interaction. These are the operational aspects of interoperability.

“Connecting data” focuses on the need to integrate data stores, optimize information flows, and address semantic issues that arise when structured and unstructured data—such as databases and metafiles—must be exchanged. Here, we need to translate between different ways of expressing information.

“Connecting diverse systems” speaks to the technical processes that are required for interoperability, ranging from simple connectivity between internal systems to industry frameworks that facilitate value-chain workflows.

The “data and diverse systems” part of our definition, the technical aspect of interoperability, is, in many ways, the easiest aspect of interoperability to implement. All it takes is math and science. The more difficult challenge comes when you add people to the mix. Now interoperability moves into the more subtle and ambiguous domains of law, policy, and organizational structure. The questions cease to be about how you can enable interoperability, and instead concern how you should enable interoperability and, indeed, whether you should enable interoperability in the first place.

We will discuss more on Interoperability and what Microsoft is doing to help promote interoperability in the next Part of this blog. As you would have guessed by know Interoperability is an Industry issue and more complex when you look deeper into it.

Surprise, Microsoft Listed as Most Secure OS

ingitaraj — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:40:50 GMT

An interesting article came to my attention, thanks to catchy headline!. The article by By Andy Patrizio for www.internetnews.com was based on the Security Threat report by Symantec. Read on ...

Microsoft is frequently dinged for having insecure products, with security holes and vulnerabilities. But Symantec (Quote), no friend of Microsoft, said in its latest research report that when it comes to widely-used operating systems, Microsoft is doing better overall than its leading commercial competitors.

The information was a part of Symantec's 11th Internet Security Threat Report. The report, released this week, covered a huge range of security and vulnerability issues over the last six months of 2006, including operating systems. Read on ...

Vista Sidebar Gadgets - Made in Singapore

ingitaraj — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 10:14:46 GMT

For all of the people in Singapore ( I guess there are 4.5 Million of us in the city) some local Singapore Gadgets have gone live at the Singapore Gadgets Site.

Some of the Gadgets you will see there are :

LTA Road Monitoring Gadget
Virtual Map Gadget
CNBC Live News Gadget
MediaCorp Radio Gadget
Singapore Weather Gadget
E-Book World
CPF Voyage of Life

My personal favorites are LTA Road Monitoring Gadget, MediaCorp Radio Gadget ( I have stopped using my FM Radio), Virtual Map (Streetdirectory, Yellow Pages, SMRT, DNA all in a great Mash up example)

We are looking for Singapore Gadget Ideas. If you have some ideas on what kind of Gadgets you would like to see in Singapore, let us know. The best ideas we get and get adopted into Gadgets get some cool Microsoft Hardware prizes.

Technorati tags: Singapore, Vista Sidebar Gadgets

Technorati tags: LTA, MediaCorp, CPF, CNBC, Virtual Map, E-Book