Posted by Colette StallbaumerDirector, Worldwide Marketing and Operations
Perhaps no trend has affected IT managers and developers more over the past year than the consumerization of IT. With seemingly every customer and employee tethered to a different device, it’s more critical than ever to enable cross-platform collaboration. That’s why we announced last week that the next service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM will enable customers to access the complete functionality of the application on virtually any mobile device, thanks to a new cloud-based, cross-platform native mobile client for Windows Phone 7, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices.
This week, we announced another developer toolkit to support Windows Phone interoperability: the beta release of the open source Windows Phone toolkit for Amazon Web Services (AWS). This release is another example of the open approach we’re taking with our mobile platform, helping to make Windows Phone development accessible to anyone who can create the next great app. You can also see this in our support for open source mobile frameworks, such as recently announced PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile, which enable developers to build applications targeting multiple platforms by using standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). The recent announcement of Microsoft’s protocol licensing agreement with AgreeYa Mobility further illustrates a commitment to openness for our mobile customers.
Wired ran this story today on Microsoft’s internal thought processes and changes that have taken place over the last eight years on the journey with open source software. Cade Metz examines how Microsoft has been making steady progress on both fostering interoperability with open source and enabling open source on our platforms. This nicely sums up some of our latest efforts:
"From the outside looking in, it appears that Microsoft has indeed turned the corner. The company recently added two open source platforms to Windows Azure — its new-age web service for building and hosting applications on the net — and it’s actually contributing open source code to these projects — as well as others. These aren’t minor open source projects. They’re big name projects with huge followings: Node.js and Hadoop. This would not have happened in the past."
Read the full story here.
We’re getting a little love for tweaking a version of Hotmail specifically for the Kindle Fire, announced this week. Kindle Fire users can now enjoy the familiar benefits of Hotmail. Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet’s “All About Microsoft” blog correctly notes that this follows a slew of apps we rolled out last year for other non-Microsoft mobile devices, such as OneNote for the iPhone and iPad, and Lync client for Android and iPhone. Stay tuned as we’ll be continuing in this vein throughout the year and let us know what other productivity apps you’d like to see expanded to new platforms.
At yesterday’s Node Summit, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie presented a new way to deploy to Windows Azure: Cloud9 IDE. Cloud9 IDE is a cross-platform, browser-based development environment for Node.js.