Developing Php Applications Using Microsoft Software And Services

Editor's Notes

• #5: There is no one right way to achieve interoperability. Vendors, depending on their market position, product and customer needs, are taking varying approaches to enable greater interoperability with their products. That said, Microsoft is making significant investments and efforts to address this issue. We are taking a multi-faced approach to providing our customers the ability to choose best of breed applications for their business needs. Our goal is to deliberately design interoperability into our products, especially our core business products. Not only has Microsoft taken a leadership role in the standardization of Web Service (WS-*) specifications through the W3C and OASIS, but we’ve provided and incorporated early, complete implementations of these specifications and protocols into almost all of our applicable products. We’ve also worked with other vendors to test the compatibility of these protocol implementations through plugfests. We continue to enhance our products with new capabilities that can help reduce the cost of running a mixed IT environment. Through our work with the IEC Council, IVA and other technical collaborations, we are also building technical bridges—such as plug-ins and translators—that enable an ever-growing number of products to work with Microsoft solutions. Working with other industry members, Microsoft collaborating with, and broadening our relationships with, dozens of technology companies to improve interoperability for our mutual customers. We’re working with the companies whose products are in your data centers and on your desktops—EMC, IBM, Novell, Oracle, SAP, Sun and many others. In addition to partnerships with individual companies, Microsoft is also a member of the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), which brings together more than 50 hardware and software vendors. This collaborative industry group develops, tests, publishes and supports interoperable, multi-vendor solutions.Wealso are also actively collaborating with the open source community. We believe both Microsoft and open source software can provide value to our customers, and we want to make it easier for customers to develop and deploy a mix of open source and Microsoft technologies. Today there are more than 80,000 open source projects that run on Windows or are built with our development platform, .NET. We are even releasing our some of our internally developed code to the open source community. Microsoft both competes and partners with traditional commercial vendors, and will continue to do so with open source-based businesses, with a focus on providing value for shared customers. For example, our ongoing working with MySQL to ensure a great experience for .NET developers using Visual Studio and the MySQL database, or our work with SugarCRM to ensure SugarCRM customers have a great experience with Outlook integration. This is the reality in a heterogeneous world.Standards are also central to our interoperability efforts – though, we don’t believe that standards, by themselves, are sufficient to resolve the industry’s interoperability issues. At Microsoft, our belief is that customers are best served when we support open standards, then compete in the marketplace on customer value. Our products support a long list of standards, allowing them to interoperate with other products that also implement those standards. Where we see an unmet need in the market, we work jointly with other industry players to specify new standards that can help resolve the big interoperability issues facing enterprise customers. Each year, Microsoft contributes to, and collaborates with, more than 150 standards organizations.Finally, we are being more open in how we share and provide access to our intellectual property. We’ve taken a number of steps to make it easier for developers to build solutions that work alongside Microsoft products. Through activities such as our technical licensing program, interoperability labs, community support forums, and the publishing of more than 50,000 pages of technical documentation, we are creating more opportunities for people to develop products that complement, sometimes even compete with, Microsoft solutions. This gives our customers more choices for innovation, and a greater range of options for getting even more value from the Microsoft products you already use.Everything begins and ends with our customers. It’s the input and feedback we get from customers that help us set, and if needed reset, our priorities for the product innovations we develop, the collaborations we pursue and the standards we support. It also drives our desire to foster a rich software ecosystem that provides increased opportunity for customers to take advantage of the strengths of Microsoft technologies in a mixed IT environment. Through these combined efforts, we aim to drive greater interoperability and “walk the walk” of our commitment to increased openness.