Microsoft’s recent interoperability announcement made lots of noise. Dominic Sartorio, the Open Solutions Alliance commented on this announcement on the OSA blog.

The announcement is focused on Windows Vista and the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, as well as future versions of these products. In their press release, Microsoft expresses its wish to “ensure open connections, promote data portability, enhance support for industry standards, and foster more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities”.

The day after the announcement, technical specifications techniques of these products were available online and can now be accessed: Microsoft released to developers and integrators over 30,000 pages of documentation that will help them with interoperability, while ensuring them that they won’t be sued if they implement these protocols.

Even though some (such as the European Commission) have voiced concerns that Microsoft has made similar commitments in the past, this announcement is good news for enterprises, and of course for the OSA that acts daily to solve interoperability issues. As Dominic said, the management at Microsoft has heard the more and more frequent demands from users who deploy open source solutions and need them to interoperate with Microsoft’s technologies.

It is also worth noting that this announcement occurs after the European Court of Justice has imposed a stiff penalty on Microsoft for having abused its dominant position, related to all of its software suite. And that even though the information is now freely available, users will need to pay royalties to Microsoft to deploy solutions using this documentation. The road is still long, before we reach true interoperability, as we define it in the open source world. Sharing information is good, allowing its free use is even better!

For more information, I recommend the Port 25 blog, that explains Microsoft’s open source and interop strategies and comments on related news. Of special interest is this piece by Sam Ramji where he explains how open source influenced the development of Windows Server 2008 and shows how their development methods have evolved.

Bertrand