Today more than ever, globalization is driving unprecedented communication and collaboration across businesses, governments and the people they serve. In this environment, you face the complex task of getting your people, your systems, and your IT working smoothly together. The organizations that do this well, will excel.

What is Interoperability?

Mixed technology environments can be very difficult to manage, and expensive to maintain. Different technologies don't always "talk to one another," and, as a result, IT pros and business leaders alike face numerous challenges. Interoperability connects people, data, and diverse systems so that your organization’s data is available to those who need it, and as a result, processes flow more smoothly.

What Interoperability means for Government

With interoperability, you have the choice and flexibility to leverage your existing hardware, software and services with new complementary technologies that are the best for the job. You also gain the cost efficiencies that come with the increased productivity from integrating information and processes, and with making and keeping data more available to people, when and where they need it.

For Governments, interoperability enables more effective use of existing investments, reducing the resource burden on IT. It also ensures that service delivery leaders get full value for their money going forward—even during periods of rapid policy and technology changes.

Interoperability is also a cornerstone of the open government movement where governments seek to transform their relationship with constituents by publishing their raw data for use by individuals and business.

How Microsoft is bringing it all together. More openly.

Microsoft has a long history of working with other companies to ensure that products work well together, and has an ongoing commitment to improving interoperability. Microsoft is building on this commitment, and is taking steps to increase the openness in engineering and intellectual property; openness in relationships with customers; and engagement with industry, standards, and policy bodies. This helps increase customer choice, and drives advances in real-world interoperability across Microsoft products and services, and various other technologies, including open source. As a result, people can exploit the full functionality of Microsoft technologies within complex mixed IT environments, while increasing the flexibility to integrate additional tools best suited for the job.

Microsoft has a long history of working with other companies' products and working with competitors to make sure that different companies' technology "just works" together.

In the news… 

The Open Government/Open Data trend in Canada and worldwide has brought about great opportunities for developers to create applications using open government data sets. Microsoft teamed up with Vancouver partner Nitobi to build an exciting new app called VanGuide, a web and mobile-based social mapping application that allows citizens to tag, rate and comment on Vancouver landmarks and locations. The application framework created and used to build  VanGuide is Open Data Application Framework [ODAF] and was released on Codeplex as an open source project – to enable other cities in Canada, and worldwide extend the framework and create new apps on our platform.  

Watch the video and see how VanGuide is helping governments to encourage innovation and create more compelling social interactions.

IT Professionals > Adapt to changing IT needs by bringing your disparate systems and technologies together with real-world interoperability solutions.

Developers > Bring your portfolio to the next level with the tools and technology to create innovative software and applications.

Helpful Resources

Interoperabilitybridges

Interop Team Blog

Interop Vendor Alliance

Microsoft.com/Interop

Channel9 Interoperability

Document Interop Initiative (DII)

Port25

thumbtackhead

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