Less than a month after declaring that it would do so, Microsoft has posted more than 14,000 pages of documentation on Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007, reports Reuters.

The documents cover protocols that allow those products to connect to each other; they are preliminary, Microsoft says, and input from developers will lead to finalized versions in June. Today's additions bring to over 40,000 the number of pages of documentation that Microsoft has made available for review and use, says PCWorld.com. Whether that number is good news or bad news to you may depend on whether your position will require you to familiarize yourself with 20,000 or 30,000 or so of them.

This InformationWeek article contains reminders on the royalties that commercial users will be required to pay for use of these APIs in development for profit.

Microsoft, so far, has been fined over $2.5 billion by the European Commission since 2001 for not adhering to that body's antitrust rules and orders to comply. This offering of APIs is a large part of Microsoft's strategy to put an end to its battle with the EC. Amid other steps toward achieving its stated interoperability goals -- such as joining the Kerberos executive advisory board -- and its OOXML victory, Scott Bekker at Redmond Channel Partner takes a very detailed look at how Microsoft chose the four pillars of this new strategy and how it requires Microsoft partners to reassess their business cases.