Comments on: Office for Mac and the interoperability divide

As an industry we are terrible at working on interoperability. The open-source world should be the one to fix this.

[craigkitterman]

Appreciate the pragmatism...

Microsoft is very committed to improving interoperability across the industry and we are taking a very proactive approach to move the ball forward. In addition to the Open Source partnerships that you mention (there are many more BTW), we are working directly with our competitors and partners (incl. OSS vendors) through the Interoperability Vendor Alliance (InteropVendorAlliance.org). We are listing very hard to our customers worldwide to learn about and address their real world interoperability problems in a very programmatic way. I believe that working together with the community is one of the most effective ways to achieve pragmatic interoperability and I look forward to discussing this further on the bike trail, in the blogosphere, and at industry events.

Craig Kitterman
Interoperability Program Manager
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/craig

[dominic_sartorio]

Proposal...

Hi Matt,

Thanks for helping raise awareness around this. The OSA (www.opensolutionsalliance.org) has been focusing on interoperability since we launched... Admittedly we've focused more on interop within the commercial open source world, and less on interop with private-source/legacy technology, which is what you're advocating in this post. Nonetheless this is something we're hearing from customers is important and we want to take it on, bandwidth and resources permitting.

Actually we've had positive informal conversations with Microsoft's open source interop group about doing something like you suggest, notably with Sam Ramji, but the patent fud coming from the "parent org" gave us pause.

Anyhow, here's what we are thinking. You ask how to "help proprietary vendors figure out how to engage open-source communities and companies without getting burned". It's easy for them to get burned given how fragmented we are, collectively. There are tens of standards bodies out there, hundreds of viable commercial open source companies, and thousands of viable communities. Where to start? We propose to provide them with one "common front", one organization that can adequately represent the interoperability interests of a sufficient subset of the commercial open source ecosystem. That organization must, of course, operate as transparently and collaboratively as the word "open" would imply, thus having the necessary credibility, and it should also act pragmatically, by always keeping customers' interests in mind and not reinventing wheels. We're doing this with the OSA. So, our suggestion is to help the OSA act as the "point person" for commercial open source, and help us reach out to the "open source beachheads" within each major proprietary vendor. (Microsoft clearly has one, as does Oracle.)

Your thoughts welcome, as always. Feel free to respond here, or privately, or, if you're serious about kicking something off in Deer Valley, then please count us in. FYI- We're kicking off a Customer Forum Series this month, and proprietary interoperability requirements discussion is on the agenda, so we'll soon have a lot more real-world data to go by.

[anyoneu]

European Commission

"In my world, customers are asking that Sharepoint repositories interoperate with Alfresco repositories interoperate with Documentum repositories interoperate with...In the database world, enterprise customers want their Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, Ingres, MySQL, etc., databases to work together (indeed, EnterpriseDB is building a solid business by offering drop-in compatibility with Oracle). In e-mail, more applications (open source and proprietary) should interoperate with Exchange."

Ummm Matt. That's what the European Commission v Microsoft is about. Microsoft embraced and extended open standards and made billions off keeping their encrypted protocols secret. If you go and make deals outside of the EC decision, you're going to make MS very happy, and that's not good for open source and GPL'd software.

BTW, since Microsoft can't even get their Mac Business Unit to produce an OOXML converter (and Office 12008 won't have VBA, unlike the Windows version), I don't think MS standards mean much.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_applications/the_pointless_office_converter_delay.html

"he Mac faithful (of which I am part) won't like to hear this, but it's true. OpenOffice is an excellent program (It actually is now--three years ago it was rubbish), but many of us simply couldn't use it "in production." "

Have you tried NeoOffice, the new native Mac Openoffice.org or the LanguageTool grammar checker addon?

http://neooffice.org
http://www.linux.com/articles/6171
http://www.languagetool.org/
http://www.linux.com/articles/61714