Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Server Center, Partnerships

Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows

jcannon — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:59:00 GMT

Our community knows that open source businesses are important to Microsoft. Nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that open source was a key theme in the recent Windows Server 2008 Launch. You can read more about that here.

One of the individuals we highlighted was Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO at Mindtouch. Mindtouch develops an open source collaboration platform. Today, I'm excited to have Robert Mason, Mindtouch Platform Engineer, update us on the progress Mindtouch has made in delivering a first class open source experience on Windows. Take it away Bob....

Short Demo Video: MindTouch Deki 8.05.2

This demo video goes through a lot of information quickly. It shows the basics of collaboration in MindTouch Deki and then demonstrates a mashup with a Microsoft Silverlight charting package. NOTE: With MindTouch Deki creating mashups, dynamic reports and dashboards does not require programming ability.

Hello! It’s great to be asked to guest blog here at Port 25. Last you had heard from us, we had written about MindTouch Deki from the start being written in C#, but running solely on Mono inside of a Linux environment. Well, that’s all about to change… I’m happy announce that for the first time, MindTouch is releasing an official Windows-based beta version of MindTouch Deki. Specifically, you may now install using a MindTouch-created Microsoft Windows MSI!

MindTouch Deki is an open source collective intelligence platform. In other words, it is an enterprise wiki that sits atop a web-services framework and enables mashups, dashboards, and dynamic reporting from disparate systems and databases. MindTouch Deki provides a unique collaboration tool for enterprises and workgroups. Rather than taking the less useful approach of other collaborative and Enterprise 2.0 applications by providing a simple walled-garden / point application, MindTouch has developed Deki with the collaborative intuition of a highly polished and robust enterprise wiki, but is also able to federate and mashup application and data silos. It was developed on Microsoft .NET using C#, and, until today, has only officially supported installations on Linux using Mono.

Although this is a beta release, the MindTouch team has worked hard to include all major features and functionality currently available to Deki users on Linux-based operating systems. Please report any problems or issues that you may discover either at our forums or by filing a bug. This new MindTouch Deki MSI beta supports IIS 7 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista only. However, the final release of the MSI will also support IIS 6 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Download the MindTouch Deki MSI today. We're very excited to at last be offering support for Microsoft IIS 6 and 7 on Vista, Windows Server 2003, and 2008. MindTouch Deki has enjoyed a groundswell of adoption with daily downloads in the thousands; by (finally) introducing an easy and officially supported means of installing on Windows Server and Windows Vista we are expecting great things! Now, Systems Integrators and .NET developers can return to their existing customer base (and find new customers) to deliver more value by "adding the 2.0" to the enterprise infrastructure in the form of a collaborative surface atop the existing infrastructure that they've already deployed.

Write MindTouch for more information about our web-oriented architecture or for a high level explanation read about our technologies at the website. Finally, expect to see more Microsoft-related updates from MindTouch in the coming months… Subscribe to our monthly eNewsletter at www.MindTouch.com to stay up to date on new Microsoft related products and offerings.

Thanks,
Bob Mason

Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability

Community Contributor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:33:00 GMT

First, many thanks to Microsoft’s Port 25 Team for the opportunity to post today!

Today SpikeSource announced the availability of five additional PHP-based applications on the Windows Server 2008 platform. Gallery, Mantis, Moodle, PhpBB and WebCalendar are available for free download from www.spikesource.com. We welcome you to take a look and to offer your feedback!

Similar to the previous applications we released on Windows Server (Drupal, Alfresco), SpikeSource delivered these as turnkey “SpikeIgnited” applications, with all components needed to run the application available in a single one-click-install distribution. We have also included a variant of our SpikeNet update service optimized for Windows Server 2008.

“That’s great”, you might say, “SpikeSource has ‘Ignited’ a few more apps, so what’s the big deal?” We believe the big deal is that these applications also run on a stack of other Microsoft products in addition to Windows, namely, IIS/Fast-CGI and SQL Server Express, with which many open source products have historically not interoperated well. Quite a bit of engineering went into assembling this “WISP” stack and building/testing these PHP applications, and this know-how is an important step towards improving the interoperability between the worlds of Microsoft and open source.

Why do this? Because customers want it. Throughout SpikeSource’s history, nearly 50% of our customer’s request Windows versions of our open source applications, and most of them also care about interoperating with IIS, SQLServer, Sharepoint, ActiveDirectory and so forth. Our experience is representative of the industry. Ask any commercial OSS ISV with a server-side application, and they’ll tell you the same thing, with similar numbers.

Also, last December, the Open Solutions Alliance (www.opensolutionsalliance.org) published a report (pdf) summarizing the results of its customer outreach efforts. One of the key findings was that customers want better open source and Microsoft interoperability, and moreover, they felt this was the issue that the industry has collectively done the least to address. While there has been a lot of unfortunate history that has gotten in the way of this, ultimately customers don’t care as much about grudges as they care about everything simply working. Together, SpikeSource and Microsoft’s open source lab are doing something about it.

The release of these five PHP applications is just a first step. By taking five commonly used PHP applications and making them run better on a Windows stack, we took a step towards better interoperability, and we also built some technical expertise that we intend to leverage more broadly and share with the community in the future.

So, stay tuned, and we welcome your input. What other types of open source applications are important to run well on Windows? What specific technical issues do you have that you would like to see us solve? What more can we do? Please send us your feedback!

Dominic Sartorio
Sr Director, Product Management, SpikeSource
President, Open Solutions Alliance

Xensource, Microsoft and Virtualization: Sam Interviews Simon Crosby, Xensource CTO

MichaelF — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 08:16:00 GMT

Today Microsoft announced the addition of it's Virtual Hard Disk Format (VHD) to the list of specifications covered by the Open Specification Promise (OSP). As a result individuals and organizations can use, redistribute and modify Microsoft's virtualization format for free.

In light of this announcement we thought it would be a good time to catch up with a company that utilizes the VHD format: Xensource. In this podcast Sam and Simon Crosby, CTO of Xensource, discuss the Xensource and Microsoft partnership, Veridian, virtualization approaches, what's on the horizon and more.

Centeris was Here

MichaelF — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:30:00 GMT

Capturing the sentiment from my colleagues, Anandeep, Hank and Sam – I LOVE THIS JOB !!! Last week I had a chance to meet w/ Mozilla, watch Sam interview Steve Wozniak and the wonder of it never ceases to amaze me. This week, we had a chance to have lunch w/ Barry Crist, the CEO of Centeris, Krishna Ganugapati their VP of Development and Chuck Mount, the VP of Marketing. Centeris is a company based out of Bellevue, WA that makes the Likewise product which allows Linux Servers to be manages within a Windows centric environment. We all got off to a great start in our discussion because one of the core and common goal that ties us together to the charter of partners like Centeris is “Interop”. Yes, Interop, and finding more and better ways for Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms or products to co-exist and thrive. This is a really important charter for not only the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab but for also all of Microsoft. After brief introductions to the Program Managers of the Team and our beloved Penguins, we got down to discussing what Centeris as a company was all about and more importantly, what is it that “Likewise” did. Barry and Chuck gave us a very good insight into what the overall focus of Centeris was about and why there is a prominent need for providing this functionality in a heterogeneous environment.

If you’re an ITPro managing a small, medium or an enterprise-wide shop, you know how diverse and today’s implementations are and/or can be. This translates to greater complexity while managing your environment, which as the market data will tell you, is rarely single-platform centric. Thus, making accommodations for manageability of the diverse platform-portfolio is a skill that we all much acquire sooner than later. This is where Centeris fits in perfectly for several reasons because it is extending Windows-based manageability and windows-based tools towards day-to-day management of Linux servers and improve interop. This also means that organizations that have tight budgets can continue to manage their environment with existing skill-sets under tight budgets.

The way Likwise works is where the console is installed on the Admin’s machine, the agent (which is an open source product) is installed on the Linux Server/s and using the console, these servers are managed using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). Likewise Open Agent includes server-side components (that work w/ Samba) and client-side components (that work w/ MMC) The functionality that is extended to the Linux systems is possible through RPC’s and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Likewise open agent is available on sourceforge.net and has been released under the CDDL (common development and distribution license). We found the approach that Centeris took towards Linux manageability to be very simple and ITPro centric.

The highlight of our discussion yesterday was getting to know more about Krishna Ganugapati. Krishna spent 10 years at Microsoft from 1993 to 2003 most of it in Windows development team. After we got into deep discussions, we found out that Krishna was the inventor of ADSI (Active Directory Services Interfaces), the preferred means for accessing Active Directory. Krishna also led the development teams for Windows IPSec and Window wireless security through the Windows 2000 and XP releases. The interaction that followed between all of us, penguins, PM’s and Krishna was very rewarding. Krishna got into the guts of how manageability is being approached as a concept by Centeris. The big takeway after we saw the Centeris demo, for me was that there doesn’t always have to be a steep learning curve every time new technology is introduced into the environment. Sometimes, its easier to manage new technology with familiar tools and that was a very novel concept that I walked away with yesterday. It also affirmed my faith as to why “Interop” is as prominent, as important and as critical as it is to us and to the success of Microsoft.

Thanks Centeris !!

The Hardware Vendor's Perspective

MichaelF — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:09:00 GMT

Anandeep Interviews James Jech, Senior Manager of Global Alliances and Business Development from Dell Inc's Enterprise Systems Group, to discuss how the evolution of hardware has impacted how users choose an operating system and how they deploy their infrastructure.

Video: The Hardware Vendor's Perspective

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Tom Kemp & Paul Moore: Integrating Linux, UNIX and Windows with Centrify

admin — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:40:00 GMT

Sam interviews Tom Kemp, CEO and Paul Moore, CTO, of Centrify, to learn more about how customers are successfully implementing Active Directory and standards to create centralized identity management, account admin, single sign-on and more...

Video: Tom Kemp and Paul Moore with Centrify

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