Stories about: Interop

Virtualization and cloud computing will help companies accomplish more by breaking the physical bonds of an IT infrastructure and its users, executives from Cisco and Novell proclaimed this week during their keynote addresses at Interop New York. But caveats such as heightened security threats must be overcome in order to fully benefit from this new computing paradigm, they warned.

The obvious thought came to me while writing last week's column, that about the only folk (other than the deluded and amoral management of the SCO Group) that want the SCO Group effort attacking Linux and other open source initiatives to succeed is Microsoft. So I decided to explore that side in this follow-up column, but a bit of reading led me to the conclusion that things are not as simple as they appear.

Microsoft on Monday unveiled projects to improve data portability between Office 2007 and other document file formats, including the design of a new translator for exchanging OOXML (Office Open XML) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents.

A storage virtualization start-up that takes standard PCs and adds their disk space to a virtual storage-pool is in beta mode and planning a product release in the third quarter.

Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the Eclipse Foundation Wednesday did not include joining the open-source tools foundation. But the two organizations are working together to enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Windows Vista.

A pair of Novell executives Wednesday touted the company's recent financial performance, but questions during the press conference at Cebit in Hanover, Germany, focused more on Microsoft's recent, high-profile pledge to improve interoperability and shore up its relationship with the open-source community.

Microsoft made a mountainous down payment on its high-profile pledge Thursday to improve interoperability and warm up its relationship with the open-source community, releasing some 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols. After digesting the news and at least some of the documentation, the reaction within the open-source community was varied, ranging from cautious praise to outright scorn.

After decades of tenaciously guarding its protocols and APIs, Microsoft cut some major chains protecting the intellectual property of its Windows and other core enterprise products.

The Open Solutions Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by a number of commercial open-source vendors, released a survey on Wednesday that found interoperability is a foremost concern among open-source-software customers.

Microsoft is offering updates on the progress of interoperability initiatives, including the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC) and the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA).

The Storm worm is fighting back against security researchers that seek to destroy it and has them running scared, Interop New York show attendees heard this week.