One year after signing a landmark agreement to build a bridge between open source and proprietary software, Novell Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today unveiled continued strong momentum behind the agreement.

Beyond this customer momentum, the two companies continue their technical collaboration on solutions to help customers work more efficiently in the areas of virtualization, standards-based management, directory and identity federation, and document format compatibility. Indeed, Microsoft and Novell engineers are now working closely in the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Mass., running automated tests to ensure the interoperability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Windows Server virtualization and Windows Server 2008 with Xen. The combined team is working with developers in Redmond, Wash.; Provo, Utah; and Nuremberg, Germany; to ensure seamless interoperability between the two operating systems.

Building on the success of this collaboration, Novell and Microsoft today announced they will work together to make it easier for all software companies and developers to create and deliver accessible products for Windows and Linux* platforms, providing better computer access for people with disabilities, especially those who are blind, in today’s increasingly digital world.

Microsoft will make available its User Interface Automation (UIA) specification, an advanced accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products for people with one or more disabilities, and pledge not to assert any Microsoft patents necessary to implement the specification against anyone, regardless of platform, in the open source and proprietary software communities. In concert, to promote interoperability between leading accessibility frameworks in the market, Novell will develop and deliver an adapter that allows the UIA framework to work well with existing Linux accessibility projects and complement the investments made by IBM Corp. and others. Novell’s work will be open source and will make the UIA framework cross-platform while enabling UIA to interoperate with the Linux Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), which ships with SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu Linux. The UIA solution will ensure interoperability of nonvisual access to the next generation of software applications.

Update:

• UI Automation Community Promise Specification