According to Craig Shank, general manager, Interoperability, Microsoft, “Microsoft’s cumulative posting of approximately 50,000 pages of technical documentation on MSDN provides consistent, open access for all developers, which enhances the ease and opportunities for working with Microsoft’s high-volume products. Moreover, our work with partners, competitors and customers to engage in the technical nuts-and-bolts of real-world interoperability provides great ongoing opportunities for collaboration to address the challenges of today’s diverse IT environment.”
To ensure open connections to its products, Microsoft has posted on MSDN Version 1.0 releases of technical documentation for Microsoft protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
As a result of the documentation, developers working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 protocols will have additional resources to develop products that work with Microsoft Office 2007 client applications. In addition, developers working with Exchange Server 2007 protocols will have additional resources to build applications that directly communicate and store information related to e-mail, calendar, contacts, voice mail and task tracking with either Exchange Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.
In addition to posting this documentation, Microsoft also published a list indicating which of the published protocols built into the following products are covered by Microsoft patents or patent applications: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework) and Microsoft Windows Server 2008.
In addition, Microsoft published the non-discriminatory licencing terms and low pricing available to those who choose to take a licence to the patents covering the protocols in these products that are used to communicate with other Microsoft products.
Microsoft also posted on MSDN nearly 5,000 pages of new technical documentation for the Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .xlsb and .ppt). Access to this technical documentation, in addition to documentation provided earlier this year, will make it easier for developers to enable applications to read and write files in these binary file formats, thus enhancing the ease of moving data from one application to another. This documentation is available to anyone on a royalty-free basis under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP).
Based on input received through the DII and other events and forums, Microsoft is launching the following projects: working with Beihang University to develop Uniform Office Format (UOF) translators for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint so that users will have more options to open and save UOF documents in Microsoft Office 2007 and 2003; designing a new translator to read from Open XML to HTML, which will provide the opportunity for ISVs to enable their customers to launch Open XML documents using lightweight browser-friendly applications; and developing PowerTools PowerShell commands for Open XML to enable IT administrators to perform document management tasks. |
