Novell and Microsoft open interoperability lab

Sounds great, huh?

The news about the interoperability lab of Microsoft and Novell would seem to be a good thing. As it says:

Located in Cambridge, the 2,500-square-foot lab and workspace will be home to a combined team of the best and brightest Microsoft and Novell engineers focused on making Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise work better together. The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies. Additional work will include standards-based systems management, identity federation and compatibility of office document formats.

The lab houses more than 80 servers of varying architectures as well as a storage area network. Microsoft and Novell are committed to including other vendors and technologies as the lab continues to grow to create a heterogeneous lab environment that reflects the current IT environments and interoperability challenges facing enterprise customers today.

I don’t know though. Part of me is still cynical about this entire Microsoft working it with open source developers. In any case, I sure hope that a lot of good things will come out of it like the compatibility of document formats. That’s one thing I’d love to see. Though Microsoft’s OOXML will not be used as a standard, I don’t know what they’d like to ’sway’ their way yet. Will they be making ways to make file sharing secure and not as painful? I know Samba does work but sometimes it’s still a pain in terms of setting it up and troubleshooting it. Will this interoperability lab find ways to help us with such concerns? Part of me hopes so but I am not too optimistic about it.