Microsoft exposes Office, Exchange protocols
updated 12:55 pm EDT, Mon June 30, 2008
MS Office, Exchange guides
Microsoft has laid bare the internal workings of several key formats, according to an announcement. As a part of its Interoperability Principles program, the company has released v1.0 technical documentation for the protocols in several of its programs, primarily the Office 2007 suite. Some 5,000 pages are said to be available on the binary file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, including DOC, XLS, XLSB and PPT files.
The company has additionally provided documentation for Exchange Server 2007. its e-mail and contact software, and SharePoint Server 2007, its collaboration tool. All of the documents are intended to make it easier for third-party developers to write software compatible with Microsoft's; the lack of accessibility was behind a $1.4 billion fine from the European Commission, which accused Microsoft of failing to live up to an earlier ruling, asking it to open standards to others without charging extremely high royalty rates.
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Now we just...
...need a company to use this information to make a full-featured Exchange client for OS X, and completely embarass Microsoft.