Microsoft & Interop in Action

Earlier this morning, Microsoft brought out all the big guns to make a major announcement around, what it called, "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". Its 3 guiding interoperability principles are:

• Open connections
• Standards support
• Data portability

Now I’ve often felt that Microsoft has never been given (nor taken) enough credit for its interoperability efforts and its support for standards. With its entree into the enterprise in the late 90’s, Microsoft acknowledged implicitly and explicitly that IT is, by its very nature, heterogeneous. Active Directory uses LDAP and Kerberos. Office 2007 has moved to XML as a standard file format. Even in consumer applications like Windows Media Player, where Microsoft supports its own proprietary media formats, it does an equally good job of playing .mp3 or .avi files as well.

Notwithstanding all that, today’s announcement is an important one, if only to further assuage the EU and the Open Source community that Microsoft continues to increase its transparency.

As I spent time digesting this announcement on Microsoft.com, I came across a free download - Windows Live Writer, a very cool, free, blogging application that allows me to do WYSIWYG blog authouring and save it offline. No more creating Word docs on planes and then cutting and pasting to the web. What’s even more impressive, is that it seamlessly integrates with WordPress, my Linux-based hosted blog. The set-up process scanned my site, uploaded all the relevant formatting and gives me a far richer, more flexible authouring platform. It has optional Plug-Ins, which are downloadable from the Windows Live site. To date, there are 80 3rd-party plug-ins, including plug-ins for Firefox, RealPlayer, Flickr, Picassa and even Google functionality.

So just to get this straight, I can create an XML blog article on my Windows laptop, insert Google capabilities (if I so chose), save it to NTFS locally and publish it to a Linux server. Who knew?!?

Interoperability in action. It rocks.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter
(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

This entry was posted on 21. February 2008 at 13:00 and is filed under Microsoft, Google, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print