Microsoft recently released the first round of their open protocol documentation. These sort of documents are crucial information for anyone trying to do something challenging in the Exchange world. I was hoping to get a look at the undocumented parts of MAPI, and see a discussion of the variant that Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange, but it looks like that won’t be available for a few months.

Almost as valuable is the Active Directory Technical Specification, along with the related documents on the Security Account Manager and Directory Services Replication. For example, it gives detailed information on how to create a new user account through SAM, and a full IDL for DRS. This level of information makes it possible to design software that works seamlessly within a world of Microsoft services, so it’s not only great PR, it’s a cunning move to encourage more third-party development locked to Windows. Hopefully they’ll be rolling out the Exchange specs soon!