Microsoft fleshed out its pledge to make its products
compatible with other platforms last week by signing an agreement
with JBoss, a company specialising in open source application
servers. The companies will work together to enhance
interoperability between the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System and
the Microsoft Windows Server product range.
The cooperative effort aims to provide users with richer
functionality and better integration, resulting in a lower cost of
ownership, the two companies said.
Among the technologies being considered is Microsoft Active
Directory for integrated sign-on with federated identity and web
services interoperability using WS-* web services architecture.
Microsoft and JBoss are also investigating how Microsoft
Operations Manager can be used to manage JBoss applications and
support for SQL Server within Hibernate, JBoss' object/relational
mapping technology, and Enterprise Javabeans 3.0.
Users of JBoss include Continental Airlines, BASF,
Lastminute.com, the French Inland Revenue Service, Starwood Hotels
and the US Navy.
This is the latest move by Microsoft to provide greater support
of open source products. Speaking to Computer Weekly, Martin
Taylor, general manager, platform strategy at Microsoft, said,
"There are not any global [businesses] that run one operating
system. We work hard on interoperability."
He said more than half of JBoss users ran the application server
on top of Windows. "We have to build software that is interoperable
out of the box," he said.
Microsoft is currently working on the XML support in SQL Server
2005, which is due out in November. It has also produced a meta
directory, which allows the Active Directory to work alongside
LDAP-based directories. In conjunction with software firm Vintla,
Microsoft is providing a mechanism to distribute software to
non-Microsoft platforms via the Microsoft Operations Management
console management tool.