Many people talk about how Microsoft need to make their products more interoperable through using Open Standards and publishing their own protocols and standards. It was announced in December that Microsoft have licensed a large proportion of their protocol documentation to the SAMBA team, which effectively means in the coming years we will be able to interface with and replace annoying vendor lock-in traps like Sharepoint and Exchange. This is excellent news, and although my blogpost is a little late, I wanted to extend a huge thanks and congratulations to Andrew Tridgell and the SAMBA team on this excellent outcome!
All the details with links and such are on the SAMBA website here. If you are involved in a FOSS project that could benefit from this, you should chat to the SAMBA team.
“annoying vendor lock-in traps like Sharepoint and Exchange” I disagree that an organisation selecting either of these solutions for the enterprise is a trap. If the company has done due diligence between the commercial and FOSS equivalent products and select the Microsoft ones as the best fit or best solution in meeting their needs how is this a trap? They, by understanding the hardware, software and license requirements as part of a full investigation cannot say it was a trap, unless of course they were blindsided by a less than honest Integration partner. If so more fool them.
Yes sharing protocols and stacks etc is a great thing so no longer are you needing to reverse engineer ang guess at integration. It really gives FOSS a chance to be truly enterprise ready as it integrates with the big boys now
Hi AlphaG,
Please see my earlier blog post about Sharepoint to get a better understanding about this. Sharepoint and Exchange once committed to basically lock an organisation into a series of technology decisions that often are not taken into account during procurement, usually due to a lack of due diligence or knowledge. People are starting to wake up to that now 🙂
“usually due to a lack of due diligence or knowledge”
Thankyou for the supporting comments. If an organisation does not do due diligence for any and all software purchases (any purchase infact not just ICT) they can only blame themselves.
As I said if after due diligence a particular suite is the right fit then they acquire with eyes open then there is no lock in, traps or anything else you seem to imply with non Foss software.
It is the price they are willing to invest on a return of some type and how they measure their ROI
I noticed in the Sharepoint blog when I read it there was a question as to what software competitor Sharepoint has that matches all its features and capabilities. I didn’t see a response here. What full suite software matches all areas as a single platform choice??
This agreement covers Operating Systems specifically, not neccesarily the apps that run on the OS.
Speaking as a very biased source here, I don’t think that there is any inherent lock-in with sharepoint or exchange. There is inherent lock-in in the fact that these enterprise systems are generally long involved strategic decisions involving lots and lots of subprojects. Ripping and replacing these sorts of systems (whether it be Notes, SharePoint, Groupwise or Zimbra) is a big decision (and in the case of sharepoint, made even more difficult because it is so cool 🙂 ).
Having said that, there are plenty of opportunities to co-exist with a sharepoint environment. http://sharepoint.klickdas.de/?p=83 lists all the web services sharepoint uses, and the document libraries are accesible via Webdav.