Microsoft is currently testing the Technical Preview of Office 2010, having already released the bits to a limited number of testers, but at the same time the company has made public the protocol documentation associated with the next iteration of the Office System. In a move underlying the software giant's commitment to transparency and interoperability, detailed technical specifications for Office 2010 proprietary protocols leveraged by the product to communicate with other Microsoft software are now available to both partners and rivals. Tom Robertson, associate general counsel, stressed that Microsoft allowed free access to the Office 2010 protocols for review purposes.

“On Monday July 13th, we announced that Office 2010 and related products are available for technical preview by invitation-only,” Robertson noted. “While the products won’t be widely available until 2010, we have already published, in conjunction with the technical preview, thousands of pages of detailed technical specifications for the protocols used by Microsoft products to communicate with Office 2010. The documentation describes each protocol in detail, including technical requirements, limitations, dependencies, and other protocol behavior. Anyone in the world with a web browser is free to review it anytime they want without charge.”

Of course that publishing Office 2010 protocols comes as a natural step in the evolution of the company's Interoperability Principles strategy to open up access to information that would ensure the productivity suite plays nice with third-party solutions built by both partners and competitors. Essentially, Robertson revealed that commercial ISVs, open-source developers, and developers in customer IT departments would be able to take advantage of the technical information and start creating products that are interoperable with Office 2010 today, long before the product will be available for the public in the first half of 2010.

“I’m confident that the publication of Office 2010 protocol documentation will ultimately lead to similar benefits that increase innovation, customer choice and opportunity in the market. After all, the end-game of all this transparency is to fulfill our mutual customers’ needs for interoperability. In today’s typically mixed IT environments, customers need solutions from a wide variety of vendors to work well together, and transparency among those vendors is an essential step toward that end.”