Welcome

I am the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, and I have been working across the company on many interoperability initiatives. It makes me happy to see so many interoperability projects coming out of Microsoft and, personally, having many of them based on XML makes me doubly happy. So I thought it was the right time to open this blog with the purpose of sharing with you activities that relate to interoperability at Microsoft and to start generating ongoing discussions. Here we will write about interoperability scenarios, the technologies enabling them, and important issues concerning the industry at large.

We recognize that we need to work more at engaging with the community in an open way on interoperability. This means being certain to listen to the community and to have open discussions with you in this blog about interoperability scenarios and technologies.

Interoperability has been a long-time focus area at Microsoft. Being a platform company, Microsoft has engaged in interoperability at many levels: product features, participation in standardization bodies, publishing technologies under open licenses, and working closely with customers, governments and partners to understand the heterogeneous IT landscape and to discuss practical interoperability solutions.  These activities were formalized under the Interoperability Principles earlier this year.

My team has built several technical bridges and solutions for various products to enable interoperability with other platforms and applications. These are being run as open source projects and released under a broad BSD license, or other licenses such as MS-PL or Apache, so that our customers and partners can use them in many open and broad reaching scenarios. We have been working with many other teams at Microsoft and with both our customers and the community to develop these projects.  We also run interoperability labs and plug-fests to test how Microsoft and Non-Microsoft products interoperate.

Many members of Microsoft, as well as members of my team, such as Vijay Rajagopalan, Sumit Chawla, Kamaljit Bath, Claudio Caldato, and Jean-Christophe Cimetiere will be posting on this blog, I would like to hear your comments and feedback and also welcome open engagement on what Microsoft should be doing for interoperability. I would also like to take this chance to thank the many third party companies and community members who have collaborated with us in our efforts to improve and expand the interoperability of Microsoft technologies, platforms and applications.

Jean Paoli
General Manager of Interoperability Strategy