Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Video, Interop

Team Microsoft Sings "Them Incubator Blues" at ApacheCon

Peter Galli — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:33:00 GMT

As you probably know, Microsoft was both a sponsor and active participant at ApacheCon 2009 in Oakland, California last week.

But what you might not know is that we also showed our lighter, more fun side, when we participated in the Lightning Talks, which were held on Thursday evening, November 5, during a reception with plenty of popcorn, beer and wine.

As my colleague Jas Sandhu noted in his blog about this - and where you can also find the song's lyrics - the talks are a lively, spontaneous ApacheCon tradition with speakers getting about 5 minutes to poke at each other, the projects, technology, community etc ... and have a bit of fun!

The singing and dancing Microsoft team was led by Kent Brown, the Product Manager for Windows Communication Foundation, who was not only the singer, songwriter and guitar player, but also the author of 'Them Incubator Blues,' which is very tongue-in-cheek and loosely based on his experience participating in the Stonehenge Project and working with the community.

He was joined by me, Microsoft's open source community manager; Tanya Young, our chief cat herder at the conference; and Jas Sandhu, a Senior Technical Evangelist. It was great fun and we hope you enjoy it!

Video courtesy of Mladen Turk from Red Hat.

MindTouch, Microsoft, and Social Enterprise Collaboration

Peter Galli — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:33:00 GMT

In this, our second video filmed at an open source company, the spotlight falls on MindTouch, whose Deki Wiki enables users to connect teams, enterprise systems, publishing systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications.

The first video talked to developers at BitRock about their product as well as their thoughts on open source versus proprietary software, and can be viewed here.

The MindTouch Deki, which is built on top of the Mono, the open source .Net implementation, is downloaded some 2,000 times a day.

You'll see and hear Damien, a graphics designer, talk about his one-eyed fish and the disappearance of Phil, the filter feeder, and how he is only going to have community fish in his next tank, fish who like one another and work well together.

Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO and one of the company's founders, talks about his passion for getting the product running on Windows, with Windows Server 2008 and a Microsoft installer. For him, it really doesn't matter what technology the solution is implemented on, as long as the company has delivered a great product to the market that is "free, as in freedom, as in free speech."

While there is a groundswell of community adoption around MindTouch's Linux deployments, lots of large companies are also asking for deployments on Windows. In fact, its core market is those people who like both .Net and open source.

Take a look for yourself, and see what they have to say.

An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

anandeep — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:49:00 GMT

Michael Koziarski (a.k.a) Koz is one of the core group of about 12 people who holds the keys to the code repository for the Rails framework (also known as Ruby on Rails). They’re all listed on the Rails core page with name and mug-shot. (I checked, a guy who looks like the Michael I interviewed has his mug shot on the page!).

According to his bio there “Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) is a software consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. After a successful stint as an enterprise Java developer, he switched to rails shortly after the first public release. He’s a contributor to The Rails Way and maintains a personal blog.” That’s as good a intro as any so we thought we wouldn’t improve on it!

Michael was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit and I was able to spend some really entertaining and educational time with him. I even showed him the lab! I think he may have enjoyed his time here as he wrote about us in a blog entry.

I enjoyed talking to him – and he stayed to talk to us about Rails, the dev process and other stuff despite being very close to missing his flight!

Anandeep

Video: An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of our Friends at Teamprise

MichaelF — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT

Awhile ago we interviewed Martin Woodward from Teamprise regarding their suite of client applications that provide cross-platform access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Today Teamprise announced that they are providing complimentary licenses for the Teamprise Client Suite to developers who plan to use the license to access Codeplex. This allows projects with developers on the Eclipse IDE along with anyone on the Mac, Linux or Unix platforms to use Codeplex for hosting their projects.

To obtain access to the client go to the sign-up page.

To provide some additional information on this release and Teamprise, Anandeep sat down with Martin to catch up.

Video: Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of Teamprise

Martin's Blog about this announcement can be found here.

First Consulting Group: Building Physican Portal on JBoss & Microsoft

jcannon — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 22:21:00 GMT

In our final video interview featuring University Hospitals of Cleveland and their new Physician Portal, we have the opportunity to meet Joe Yelanich, Sr. Account Executive from First Consulting Group (FCG). FCG has a long history in the medical IT industry, and choose to deploy their solution on top of JBoss JEMS and Microsoft technologies.

Joe offers insight into the considerations and platform choices made from a consulting perspective, and why FCG chose a mix of JBoss, Java and Microsoft technologies to build their healthcare portal. More information is available on the technical and healthcare aspects to this solution in the previous segments. More information on FCG can be found on their website.

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University Hospitals of Cleveland: Healthcare Perspectives

jcannon — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Yesterday, we published the first of three video interviews with University Hospitals of Cleveland, discussing their new Physician Portal, a healthcare solution built on top Windows Server and JBoss middleware system. Ed Marx, Hospital CIO, discussed the IT needs of the hospital, and how they arrived at a solution that built on - and took advantage of - both open source and Microsoft technologies.

Today, we get an opportunity to speak to Dr. Nathan Levitan, Chief Medical Officer & Senior VP of University Hospitals, and Dr. Ed Michelson, Chairman of Emergency Medicine. Each doctor provides insight into the healthcare impact of how different, disconnected legacy systems materially impacted the quality of care provided to patients, and how the implementation of the portal has been successful in linking patient information among, and within, its various network of 150 locations. In addition, management, usability and security are also covered from an end-user's perspective.

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Duration: 10:16

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University Hospitals of Cleveland: Physician Portal built on JBoss and Microsoft Solution

jcannon — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 20:43:00 GMT

In late 2005, you may recall that Microsoft and JBoss announced a joint technology agreement to explore ways to better enhance interoperability between JBoss Enterprise Middleware Systems (JEMS) and Windows Server. This was an exciting announcement and a great opportunity to explore ways in which the two companies could work together for our joint customers.

Recently, we had the fortunate opportunity to visit one such customer, University Hospitals of Cleveland, who has implemented a joint JBoss/Microsoft solution. The result, a new hospital-wide Physician Portal, allows hospital clinicians to access multiple, diverse patient care systems as though they were one. The reduced complexity and enhanced interoperability not only save the hospital money, but improve the standard and quality of patient care.

In Part 1 of our interview - done on-site & in partnership with industry moderator Bill Laberis - we explore the technical perspectives of the solution with Hospital CIO Ed Marx. Tomorrow, we look at the healthcare perspective & will end on Friday with a discussion with First Consulting Group, the healthcare services firm who built the solution.

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Duration: 12:34

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More on University Hospitals:
University Hospitals (UH) is a community-based health care system which serves patients at more than 150 locations throughout Northern Ohio, including seven wholly owned and four affiliated hospitals.

Committed to advanced care and advanced caring, UH encompasses the region's largest network of primary care physicians, outpatient centers and hospitals. The network also offers specialty care physicians to treat almost every disease and condition, skilled nursing, elder health, rehabilitation and home care services, and occupational health and wellness.

University Hospitals is the second largest private sector employer in Northeast Ohio and is within the top five largest private sector employers in the state of Ohio.

Windows Unified Data Storage Server

MichaelF — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:36:00 GMT

Today Microsoft announced the availability of the Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 (WUDSS). Built for mixed environments this solution is highly interoperable, without loss of performance in both NFS and CIFS environments. Remote administration is also provided both through Active X RDP and Java RDP Client Support.

This sounded interesting so we sent Hank to talk with Tres Hill, Sr Product Manager, to find out why this announcement is significant for IT professionals running heterogeneous environments.

Video: Tres Hill on Windows Unified Data Storage Server

Catching up with Sugar CRM: Sam interviews Jacob Taylor

MichaelF — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:39:00 GMT

While we were in San Jose for Zendcon we had the opportunity to spend some time with Jacob Taylor, CTO of Sugar CRM. As you may remember, Microsoft and Sugar announced a technical collaboration in February focused on improving the experience of deploying and running Sugar on Windows. Sugar also decided to release the a new Sugar Suite distribution under the Ms-CL (Microsoft Community License) as part of the Shared Source Program.

In this interview Sam and Jacob discuss the path that led Jacob to being co-founder and CTO of Sugar CRM as well as what has been happening at Sugar since February. We also get Jacob's thoughts on the commercial open-source model that Sugar pioneered and the collaboration announced by Microsoft and Zend which has an impact on Sugar and its customers.

Video: SugarCRM: Sam interviews Jacob Taylor

Andi Gutmans on working with Microsoft & Improving PHP Performance on Windows

MichaelF — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:31:00 GMT

Today at Zendcon Bill Hilf and Andi Gutmans announced a new technical collaboration aimed at improving the performance of PHP on Windows both for IIS 6 as well as in the future including IIS 7 on Longhorn. The partnership has multiple components including Microsoft releasing a FastCGI add-on for IIS and Zend will establish a Windows testing lab to ensure high performance on an ongoing basis. In the end the winners are the millions of PHP developers and hosters who want an viable choice in operating systems.

In this interview Sam and Andi discuss how Zend came to be as well as the details of the announcement. Andi provides his perspective on what this collaboration will mean to the PHP community and has a question of his own for Sam.

Video: Andi Gutmans on working with Microsoft

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Windows and Linux Integration: A Conversation with the Author

MichaelF — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:25:00 GMT

Sam Interviews Jeremy Moskowitz who runs http://www.winlinanswers.com and http://www.gpanswers.com to discuss his experiences helping clients solve their Windows and Linux integration problems.

Jeremy has also penned a book titled Windows and Linux Integration which they mention in the interview. Check back on Monday when we will be publishing a complete chapter from the book for download.

Video: Windows and Linux Integration: A Conversation with the Author

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Java and .NET Interoperability: JNBridge

MichaelF — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:57:00 GMT

Update: We thought we would try our videos on YouTube...would love to hear feedback on this implementation.
Sam interviews Wayne Citrin to discuss work his company, JNBridge, has done to provide interoperability between .NET and Java.

Wayne Citrin is the CTO at JNBridge. He is the architect of JNBridgePro, and has been engrossed in Java and .NET interop issues since .NET's beta days. Previously, Wayne was a leading researcher in programming languages and compilers, and was on the Computer Engineering faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a researcher at IBM's research lab in Zürich, Switzerland, and has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Computer Science.

The JNBridge blog can be found here.

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Faces from the Collective: Shared memory anyone?

admin — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Sam Ramji sits down with resident UNIX guru and Microsoft Architect Jason Zions to discuss the history of Windows and UNIX interoperability.

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Duration: 40:43

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Partner Spotlight: Do your directories play nicely?

admin — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 08:35:00 GMT

Directory specialist Jackson Shaw from Quest Software joins Sam Ramji from the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, to talk Active Directory and interoperability.

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Duration: 25:20

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