Positive, exciting, liberating and inevitable are apparently the terms that users of Microsoft HealthVault Beta have been employing to describe the service made available in late 2007, according to the company. Sean Nolan, the Chief Architect for Microsoft Health Solutions Group, revealed that feedback for HealthVault has been generally positive and promised that the few issues reported would be addressed in the immediate future. But together with the upcoming improvements across the HealthVault service, Microsoft is also preparing to tailor platform to the needs of both consumers and developers.

For end users, the Redmond company is working to ensure that they have complete control over their information. This means that users will be able not only to upload data, but also to extract all their information at any time. As far as developers are concerned, the Redmond company will work to provide a platform on which they will be able to build applications.

"First, we are demonstrating our commitment to cross-platform development by establishing a set of open 'wrapper' libraries that facilitate HealthVault development across a broad set of environments. This week we created a Codeplex project to house the first of these libraries under the Microsoft Public License, for the Java environment. As we continue to engage with partners on other platforms, we will continue to create similar projects and solicit active participation from the HealthVault community," Nolan stated.

Of course that cross-platform development is but one aspect of the HealthVault's evolution cooking over at Microsoft. The second involves making the full source code available for the HealthVault Software Development Kit. Microsoft will release the complete .NET SDK via Codeplex and permit access through the Reference License.

"We have heard from partners that they want to have one place to go to understand the 'official' way of interacting with HealthVault, so ensuring that only we make updates to this project makes sense. But by making the full and complete source code for the .NET SDK available, there will never be any question about how Microsoft has implemented HealthVault functionality, nor will there be any fear that developers will miss out on particular HealthVault capabilities by choosing an alternate development platform," Nolan added.

And last but not least, the Redmond company is also readying the availability of the HealthVault platform XML interface protocols under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP). Developers will essentially be able to reproduce and implement the HealthVault service.

"Microsoft will make the complete HealthVault XML interface protocol specification public.
With this information, developers will be able to reimplement the HealthVault service and run their own versions of the system. Microsoft will irrevocably promise that we will not make patent claims against you for implementing the specification, subject to the terms of the OSP," Nolan promised.