Microsoft releases some of promised Office documentation

by Elizabeth Montalbano

April 8, 2008 —

Microsoft has released preliminary documentation for how several of its Office
business products interact with each other, part of the company's plan to appease
regulators by releasing proprietary protocols that help developers make its
products more interoperable.

On its Microsoft
Developer Network, the company Tuesday posted about 10,000 pages of technical
documentation for products that are a part of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite,
including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
The new documents outline the connection points between the products in the
suite and bring the total of protocol documentation pages Microsoft has released
to about 40,000, the company said.

Specifically, Microsoft published connection protocols between the following
products: Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office client applications; SharePoint
Server 2007 and other Microsoft server products; Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook;
and Office 2007 client applications and other Microsoft server products.

Now that the documentation for these protocols is public, Microsoft expects
feedback from the community on what it can do to improve or change it before
the company releases the final versions in June. Microsoft has set up an online
forum for this discussion; links to specific forums for different products
and protocols can be found there.

Over the past few of years, Microsoft has made efforts to be more transparent
in how it links its products together as it has come under fire time and again
for its proprietary practices -- particularly from regulators in the European
Union for not complying with its antitrust settlement there.

In February, the company made its boldest move yet to appease regulators and
critics by outlining a new strategy to provide more access to APIs (application
programming interfaces) and previously proprietary protocols for some of its
major software products, including Windows and Office.

Tuesday's move is a part of that plan. The company to date has been fined nearly
US$2.6 billion by the E.U. for not keeping in step with its antitrust agreement.

The documentation Microsoft is posting to MSDN Tuesday is available to any
developer or third party without a license or royalty fees. Microsoft said that
if any of the protocols contained in the documents require patents, the company
will release a list of the specific patents and patent applications for the
protocol. However, open-source developers won't need patent licenses to develop
implementations of these protocols, or for the noncommercial distribution of
these implementations, according to Microsoft's previously stated pledge to
them.

IDG News Service