Addressing interoperability

Businesses in Australia are all too aware of the challenges of making software from different vendors work together. Having built up ‘best-of-breed’ environments over a number of years, organisations are now faced with not only integrating these disparate systems but, even more importantly, opening and readying them for user-centric composite scenarios where customisation, flexibility and rich experiences are critical.

Interoperability is a proven approach for dealing with the diversity created by best-of-breed architectures. Put simply, it enables different kinds of applications and systems to do what they do best, while agreeing on a common “contract” for how heterogeneous architectures and applications can communicate and exchange data with one another. To achieve interoperability, technologists can employ a variety of tools - designing solutions for interoperability from the outset, participating in industry consortia to agree how to interoperate, and implementing standards.

The Internet is perhaps the most obvious example of this type of interoperability, given that it enables any piece of software to connect and exchange data as long as it adheres to a set of key protocols. A second example is the range of software and Web services based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which enables software to share information and opens the door to a greater degree of interoperability by design across many different kinds of software.

Enabling interoperability by design is important. Interoperability initiatives, particularly in the early days, were unique efforts – developed, tested and maintained individually to enable interoperability with a specific piece of hardware or software. Even at the high-end, customers and partners lacked the resources to keep up with the custom development, documentation, and testing and certification regimes required for this approach. It makes much more sense to create software and Web services on standard technologies like XML, which are interoperable by their nature, making products developed on them interoperable from the beginning.

Customer thinking around interoperability in Australia has shifted from simply addressing heterogeneity to broader issues of innovation, procurement and software-plus-services.

Interoperability is now recognised as a key driver for innovation and developer productivity in Australia. When systems are interoperable by design, developers, ISVs and partners can move beyond addressing integration challenges for customers and instead invest time and resources in creating new approaches and solutions that resolve common business challenges. Interoperability is also a key criterion in an organisation’s product procurement strategy, as customers recognise the importance of implementing IT systems that are interoperable from day one.

Organisations also face demands from their end users for information to be accessible no matter which system it resides in. This has led some organisations to explore the possibility of ‘mashing’ different on-premise data sources together and surfacing the results in web 2.0-based composite applications. The trend towards documenting key communications protocols and application programming interfaces (APIs) by the industry is making it easier for developers to interact with existing data sources and build solutions that make this data available to everyone in the ways they want to view it.

In February this year, Microsoft committed to four interoperability principles and corresponding actions to increase openness around Windows Vista (including the .NET framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (as well as future versions). The principles ensure open connections to these products, promote data portability, enhance support for industry standards and foster more open engagement with the industry around interoperability and standards issues.

In the last couple of months, more than 44,000 pages of documentation have been released to the market, along with the launch of specific initiatives to support their value to the community such as the Document Interoperability Initiative promoting user choice among document formats and the Interoperability Forum encouraging open engagement among proprietary and open source software communities.

These initiatives — along with the recent ISO ratification of Ecma OpenXML document standard — present significant new opportunities for software developers in Australia.

Ecma OpenXML is an international, open standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets. It is supported by the Microsoft Office 2007 suite of products, as well as by Apple, British Petroleum, Canon, HP, Intel, Novell, Toshiba and Unisys, among others. One of the first local developers to take advantage of its capabilities is Melbourne-based Plutext, which is currently developing an open source application built using the Ecma OpenXML file format that enables collaborative editing between a Microsoft Word client and Java/Linux server environments.

In summary, interoperability is best achieved through a balanced approach that includes standards, products, community, and access to intellectual property. By committing to investing in each of these elements, Microsoft is helping Australian developers, business partners and competitors extend their products and create new, innovative solutions for the future, for the ultimate benefit of the entire economy.

*Greg Stone is chief technology officer, Microsoft Australia

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