Participants:
Novell: Sabine Söllheim
1&1: Mr. Eul, Mr. Löffler
OpenXchange: Jürgen Geck
Redhat: Jan Wildeboer
Bird & Bird: Ms. Picot, Mr. Duisberg
Sopera: Dietmar Lenzen
Zend: Jürgen Langner
CORISECIO: Elmar Beck
Zimory: Behrend Freese
Microsoft: Ms. Schaefer, Mr. Urban
NIK: Mr. Michael Nordschild
Agenda:
10.00 - 12.45 Welcome and introduction
12.45 - 13.45 Lunch
13.45 - 14.30 Presentation: Interoperability strategy and open source strategy, Microsoft
14.45 - 15.45 Individual group work and interoperability project brainstorming
15.45 - 17.00 Collective discussion on project to be chosen
Meeting notes:
Welcome and introduction to the OSBF Interoperability project group, its principles and objectives by Andreas Hartl, Platform Strategy Director, Microsoft and OSBF board member.
Participant introductions:
1. Ms. Söllheim, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Virtualization SAP (Partner solutions) and Marketing, Europe, Novell: Interested in the project group to promote interoperability for proprietary and open platform solutions, in which she already has experience through collaboration with Microsoft. As a representative of an international corporation, she would like to establish an understanding for customer interoperability needs. A question arose, if integration with Samba is possible, and this will be investigated by Ms. Söllheim.
2. Mr Eul and Mr Löffler, 1&1: Mr Eul is Head of Development Hosting since 1 June 2008 and Mr Löffler leads the Hosting Platform Team with a specialization in cross platform development. Interested in interoperability to improve client communication on diverse platforms, in the direction of SaaS. The task of cross platform development is to offer hosting on a variety of platforms with the lowest possible difference. Clear, simple interfaces for efficient deployment and ease of reuse is lacking here. Legal obligations in data storage are also a significant challenge. Interested in the co-development of standards.
3. Mr Geck, CTO, Open Xchange: Works closely with 1&1, sometimes in competition with Microsoft, sometimes not. Feedback to Microsoft, that such an amount of documentation has be opened, however more still needs to be done to assist developers in working with this information. Open Xchange has 30-40 employees, with about 20 in technical areas.
4. Mr. Wildeboer, Red Hat: Open source evangelist in EMEA and representative of open source affairs (lobbying). Interoperability is increasingly important for RedHat, and they hope to establish an open standards bus to which all vendors can orientate and dock onto. In Germany RedHat has approximately 150 employees.
5. Ms Picot and Mr, Duisberg, Bird & Bird: Mr Duisberg is a Partner at Bird & Bird, an international law firm, renowned for their specialization in the IT sector. In Germany, they have run an open source sub-focus group for 5 years now. Ms Picot is a member of this sub-focus group with much experience in copyright and licensing law. They would like to better understand current trends and hope to contribute expertise in two dimensional legislation and contractual content.
6. Mr Lenzen, Project Manager, Sopera: After implementing SOA bus for the German post, Sopera now offers it as one of their products. Much experience was gained during the project, in connecting proprietary and open source systems from the customer side. Interested in further development in SaaS directions, and interoperability questions in regards to hosting standards are important issues there. Additionally, Mr Lenzen offers experience in translating freeware to open source.
7. Mr. Langner, Global Marketing Director, Zend: Zend is the PHP Company with a close connection to the Eclipse Foundation, and longstanding partnership with Microsoft to quicken PHP on Windows. Interested in building interoperability towards SOA, etc.
8. Mr. Beck, Managing Director, Corisecio: Responsible for technical issues, Corisecio has a freeware solution operating in security, and is in the process of translating it into open source. Difficulties lie in SOA, SAP, databases and mobile devices. Their solutions are completely based on standards. Interested in improving interoperability in security.
9. Mr Freese, CEO, Zimory: Founded from the DTAG research arm, experienced with TSI, develops solutions which identify unused resources in the data center and makes them available to the market on a temporary short term basis. Solution is open source based, however as they work with many virtualizations solutions providers, Mr Freese has is very interested in interoperability.
10. Mr. Nordschild, Managing Director, NIK Association: Disseminates OSBF Interoperability Project information and developments to its members.
11. Mr Seib, Chair, OSBF: It is important that the Interoperability Project keeps the end customer in mind and develop practical solutions which further open source business. A close coupling with standards is there, and the possibility to set standards through the work on interoperability projects. OSBF’s position on standardization is explored in a separate ‘Standards’ working group led by RedHat. The goal is to define 3 projects and 3 back up projects.
12. Mr. Heilmeyer, Co-founder and board member, OSBF: Responsible for events at Heise. Important for him to understand the open source scene, Microsoft’s thinking and how these fit together.
Lunch break
Presentation: Microsoft Interoperability Strategy by Sandra Schäfer, Director of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, Germany:
· Rethinking at Microsoft has taken place in the last few years, with much focus and investment in promoting interoperabilty in the interests of the customer.
· Since 2003: activities involving access to IP, special license forms and community have been undertaken
· 2005: combined activities into a single strategy: Interoperability based on 4 pillars:
o Products: “out of the box” interoperability to be ensured during product development (eg. Active Directory) and product extensions towards more interoperability (Eg. Virtualization, system center extensions to Linux and Unix management)
o Community: Getting involved with customers, partners and competition, such as the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, the Interoperability Vendor Alliance and local activities in the OSBF.
o Access: Access to IP and information for developers, special license forms for the use of such information (eg. OSP)
o Standards: Microsoft is involved in over 150 standardization bodies and contributes to development of standards, employing a large number of them in house
· In February 2008, interoperability principles were made public within the frames of the strategy, which included the further opening of core products (Windows Vista with Dot.Net framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, Sharepoint Server 2007, Office 2007 and all following versions):
o Release of all interface documentation used by other Microsoft products to connect with the core products (over 50,000 pages of documentation have been released to date).
o Data portability improvements: The customer can choose their formats (eg. With Office 2007’s SP2, ODF will be supported as a data format)
o Community participation: The Interoperabilty Forum was launched online, the Document Interop Initiative brings various partners together to discuss interoperability, in June 2008 in Munich, with concrete projects that have now been revealed to be implemented as open source projects.
o Commitment to standards: The release of lists to the core products on which standards have been implemented or modified, has been announced. Additionally standardization activities will be expanded, so for example, appointment of a National Standards Officer in Germany
Introduction to Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy, by Andreas Urban, Head of Open Source Strategy, Microsoft Germany:
· Since 2001, Microsoft has been active in open source, beginning with Windows CE and the release of Rotor code. Since then many activities have been undertaken in relation to technology and partnerships
· The first partnership was with JBOSS, and others followed eg. Zend, SugarCRM, Novell
· Microsoft has also developed its own technology under open source with two recognized open source licenses
· The strategy is based on Windows and aims to make Windows the most attractive platform for open source software
· At the same time, we act in the interests of our customers who wish to have free choice between the two worlds. Here, the issue of interoperability is very important, thus the better the Windows world is integrated to the open source world, the better it is for our customers and consequently for Microsoft.
· 50% of the open source projects registered on SourceForge today are based on a Windows platform.
Results of group work / selected projects
Project 1: Connect-a-thon, presented by Jan Wildeboer – Idea is to bring various connector vendors and users together in a conference and test interoperability in practice on a targeted topic. Later discussions came to the idea that a degree of neutrality and the objective to achieve positive solutions must be front of mind, to avoid “competitor bashing”
Project 2: SaaS Hosting Bus (with Virtualization), presented by Mr Löffler – Development of a SaaS hosting bus to be used for hosting and within companies. This solution enables a simple integration of various services from different providers.
Similar solutions exist for MS – Hosting Managment Solution – however, works only within MS
Feedback: Good innovation topic and potential to expand upon
Project 3: AASB Authentication/Authorization Service Bus, presented by Mr, Beck – Development of an authentication service bus which is not affected by the user’s security solution and offers simple integration of various security and authentication solutions.
Project groups and leaders assigned:
· SaaS Hosting Bus Plus Virtualization - Leaders: Mr. Eul and Mr. Hartl
o Mr. Lenzen
o Mr. Langner
o Ms. Söllheim
o Mr. Eul, Hr. Löffler
o Mr. Freese
o Mr. Hartl
o Mr. Geck
· AASB – Leaders: Mr Beck and DTAG (tba)
o Mr. Beck
o Mr. Lenzen
o Tom Köhler
o DTAG - per Mr. Freese
o 1&1 (tbd)
· Connect-a-thon - leaders: Mr. Wildenboer and Hr. Seibt (University / Media)
o Mr. Seibt
o Mr. Heilmayr
o Mr. Wildenbour
o Ms. Schäfer
o Mr. Geck
o Client with their in-house developers
To conclude:
· Next meeting: September
· Objective: Project plan, timelines and milestones
· Host: Novell Nuremberg – Date to be advised
