Following up on the company’s February promise to offer developers the information they need to interoperate with WIndows Vista and key server technologies, Microsoft has posted more than 14,000 pages of preliminary technical documentation on the Open Protocol Specifications area of its MSDN site. The new material brings the total amount of published protocol documentation to over 44,000 pages that any developer can access for free.
The new documentation covers protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Exchange Server 2007, including interaction between Exchange Server and Outlook, communication between SharePoint Server and other Microsoft server products, and communications between SharePoint and Microsoft Office applications.
“We believe that providing open, consistent access to these protocols will further unleash the creativity of all developers to work on real-world interoperability solutions,” said Microsoft’s general manager for interoperability and standards Tom Robertson, in a statement. “The implementation of Microsoft’s interoperability principles is an important component of our overall efforts to promote interoperability in the marketplace.”
Microsoft expects to release final versions of the protocol documentation in June.
The Redmond software giant has heralded its new stance towards interoperability as a fundamental change in the way the company does business—and, not coincidentally, one that may ease concerns of antitrust regulators in Europe, Asia, and even the United States. Microsoft recently had federal oversight of some of its business practices extended for another two years stemming from the company’s 2001 antitrust deal in 2001, and Microsoft has given up its battle with European regulators on antitrust issues, preferring to move on rather than drag out proceedings. The EU’s antitrust case against Microsoft in particular focused on documentation of Microsoft server protocols to ensure third party interoperability, as well as reasonable terms for third parties licensing that technology.
