Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the interoperability lab will enable the companies’ engineers to work together on some of the practical elements of their collaboration, such as virtualization, system management, identity federation, and office document formats.
The companies said the first priority of the lab will be ensuring interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies. Earlier this year the partners promised to deliver on three virtualization projects in 2007.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 will run as a virtualized guest on Service Pack 1 release of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Windows Server 2008 will include new virtualization technology that will also support SLES 10, while Novell will also be able to run Windows Server 2008 as a guest operating system running on the Xen hypervisor embedded within SLES 10.
Novell also has announced that it is working to develop an open source implementation of the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification, while both Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 are expected to support WS-Management later this year.
The document format compatibility work has already been revealed and sees Novell working with the Microsoft-sponsored Open XML Translator project that enables Microsoft Office to read and write OpenDocument Format documents.
At Novell’s BrainShare customer event in March, the companies demonstrated the first fruits of the interoperability deal including the ability to run Windows Server virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise, the integration between Active Directory and Novell eDirectory, and the integration between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft’s Open XML formats.
