Long-time criticized to only care about its own products, Microsoft is now showing signs of openess during the 2007 edition of its TechEd show in Barcelona. The trend begins in virtualization with the support of VMware Infrastructure 3 within its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and follows up on security with Microsoft's network access initiative (NAP).

With NAP, Microsoft announced its intention to add Linux and Mac clients support. Windows Server 2008 will thus be able to evaluate the security posture of those operating systems before letting them in on a Windows Network. Alas, Microsoft representatives were not very talkative about this : after much haggling, we could only learn that the security checks supported cover the blocking of certain ports and the checking of the firewall's state. No word on anti-virus support or other essential security tools.

The openness goodness also touches the heart of the Windows administration effort. The System Center brand is taking a central role in all things Windows within the enterprise, and while its Data Protection Manager 2007 module still ignores the rest of the world, the fundation work is there for partners to carry on.

The much improved DPM 2007 is by default able to perform Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Virtual Server hot backups, and nothing else. According to Microsoft's François-Manuel Billault talks are in progress with Oracle though, but no ETA is given.

Yet, DPM 2007 is VSS (Virtual Snapshot Services) based and thus nothing prevents third-parties to write a VSS writer module to add support for a specific application. Talking to Quest Software on TechEd's exhibition floor, we learnt that Quest is already working on extending Data Protection's application coverage. While its Recovery Manager solution already extends DPM ability to restore Active Directory (in a more granular way), Quest is working on several VSS writer modules of its own. Unix and Linux are up next, and VMware and Oracle are on the drawing board.