A few days ago Microsoft dropped the news that they are increasing their openness regarding interoperability. This is great news for the world of software, even though everyone has their own opinions in this matter.

What now have been made public is more than 30.000 pages of documentation of the various protocols used within Microsoft server products (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007). You can find the documentation in the MSDN Library or on the Microsoft Download site.

I found a few interesting documents that I think are worth reading or saving for future reference:

WebDAV extensions

There are three documents related to extensions Microsoft have made to the WebDAV protocol, which includes some new verbs (GETLIB), headers and optimizations of the WebDAV protocol.

If you are working with implementing WebDAV enabled software/applications and would like integrate with the Office products these are highly interesting.

Windows Search Protocol

This document describes how to interact (search or manage) with the Windows Search service.

Security

The document called [MS-SECO] Windows Security Overview contains really good information on the security in Windows and how authentication and authorization is handled as well as detailed information on security principals, SIDs and accounts and groups.

I welcome this strategic change by Microsoft. It is a lot to read, but if/when Microsoft gets the search on MSDN to work better (I currently use Google to search MSDN) we will have much easier to understand how the different products interact.