OStatic

On Tuesday Microsoft released over 14,000 pages of documentation concerning Sharepoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007, and MS Outlook 2007 as well as the communications protocols used these products. The documentation was released on the company’s MSDN site as part of the openness pledge it made following the recent EU court judgment against the company.

The good news is that open source developers can use the published protocol information to develop clients that interact with Microsoft servers using the same feature sets available to Microsoft software clients. We may finally see open source email and calendaring applications that can natively integrate with corporate MS Exchange servers. Outlook’s stranglehold on the enterprise IT email client market may soon come to an end.

The open source community will also be able to make use of the protocol information to develop applications that integrate Microsoft Sharepoint servers with MySQL data stores. I also expect to see a number of open source projects replicate Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync direct push email service for Linux, Symbian and Android based smart phones.

While anyone is free to download the new documentation, the license that covers the recently released material dictates that it can be used freely to create noncommercial open source applications, but commercial developers will be required to pay Microsoft a licensing fee.
However, the current version of the available documentation is neither complete nor in its final format. Microsoft has said that the current release is part of a phased approach. It intends to get developer feedback on the current documents and release the final versions in May.

Given that Microsoft may be acquiring their largest open source Exchange competitor (Zimbra) if they complete their purchase of Yahoo!, it will be interesting to see where open source competition to the Exchange-Outlook client server bundle will come from. Some development teams in the open source community are probably up to the task of trying to displace Exchange server by leveraging existing corporate Outlook deployments. Conversely, others will be looking at Outlook as the weak link, trying to build a new client that can be dropped into an Exchange shop without disrupting the deployed mail servers.

Of course, these open source teams will have to go β€œold school” publishing truly open source applications and looking for remuneration only on the service side of the equation.

What do you think Microsoft would do if there was serious competition to its Exchange or Outlook products based on the documentation it is releasing?

• Microsoft
• open source
• OSS
• EU
• Exchange
• Outlook