Last week, on November 5th 2009, we had our 3rd Interoperability Council in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Vienna. The council is an 
independent group of technology experts that discusses current interoperability-challenges between the Microsoft platform and other platforms.
Of course a special focus of this group are local and regional standards as global standards are mostly addressed by the Microsoft corporation, itself. During the meetings we typically discuss current issues and try to identify ways (processes, approaches etc.) for solving these problems together. We are really running this in a very pragmatic way – as soon as the council identifies benefits for all parties (customers, partners, Microsoft), we try to find ways for taking on the challenges.
Results from the council of the previous months
The council was founded with his first meeting on February 10th 2009. In this first meeting we also identified a few potential challenges. For two of them we organized what we call interoperability labs, for one I’ve written an article and published it on my blog last week.
In a lab we typically setup 2-3 workshops of 1-2 days with a small sub-group of the council and experts the members of the council are brining into the game. During these labs we either really work on concrete concepts or even source code (depending on the type of 
the lab) to solve a certain, strategically important challenge. The idea is really to bring together a group of bright people in a very pragmatic way and try to find ways for dealing with interop-challenges identified by the council. If we come up with concrete results then it’s a success, if not, then we know at least, which further actions we would need to take for dealing with a challenge, how big the necessary investment would be and whether driving further investigations is worthwhile or not! Fortunately with the previous labs we were successful. The results of our council are remarkable:
e-card Interop-Lab
Published Open Source Components
Published a business-article (German) on our team-blog
Published a technical article of the results on my blog
e-Government Portal-Connection-Protocol
Published Open Source Components
Whitepaper on supporting this Austrian eGovernment standard
Identity Interoperability
Article on Identity Interoperability (incl. PoC with Metro/WSIT)
If you are interested, then just read on our team-blog on the council (German, only). Now were going into the next phase and looking for further, important interop-challenges. Let’s see what happens and what the council will come up with in the next months!
Cheers
Mario