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Microsoft and Sun report on progress of collaboration

As I wrote about two weeks ago, the area of integration between Sun and Microsoft around directory services is a powerful reason for their new alliance. The Wall Street Journal has a quick piece that reports on their first joint progress report.

Sun and Microsoft executives emphasized that the collaboration has just begun and will need time to take shape. “Nine months ago we were slashing each other’s tires,” said Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos. “Now we’re helping each other fix each other’s flats.”

The companies said that they have held 15 executive-level meetings in the past five months and that they have held monthly meetings of 24 engineers from both companies. The companies also set up an advisory council of executives from corporate customers that use both companies’ products.

One of the first big tests of the alliance, executives said, will be making it possible for a user to enter one password and log on to corporate applications based on either Sun or Microsoft technology. Mr. Papadopoulos said engineering teams were grappling with how to solve that thorny problem, but weren’t ready to pronounce a solution yet.

However, a problem this big and this obvious also has a lively open source project aiming to bridge the gap. SAMBA is a project designed to provide interoperability between various OS for file, print, authentication and other services. See the full story here.
SAMBA4, a major re-coding and re-architecting initiative (see here for detail, is nearing alpha release - it’ll probably take quite a while, but they are making quick progress.