Microsoft Corp. today announced several new actions that deliver upon the commitments set in its Interoperability Principles to increase the openness of its products, drive greater interoperability, and provide increased opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Highlights of the actions announced today include: posting Version 1.0 releases of technical documentation for Microsoft protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007; posting nearly 5,000 pages of new technical documentation for the Microsoft Office binary file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (.doc, .xls, .xlsb and .ppt); and making significant strides in the company’s efforts to foster more open engagement with other members of the IT community.

In addition, Microsoft made a number of strides in its effort to foster more open engagement with the IT community, in particular through its Document Interoperability Initiative, which kicked off earlier this year. Since then, Microsoft has hosted a series of regional roundtable events and labs around the world — in Seoul, South Korea; Beijing, China; and Munich, Germany — bringing together more than 30 partners and competitors to test interoperability between existing implementations of Open XML Format and the OpenDocument Format (ODF) on a variety of platforms and devices, including Mac OS X Leopard, iPhone, Palm OS, Symbian OS, Linux and Windows Mobile.