Developers who want to make their applications look like Office 2007 can obtain from Microsoft a free perpetual license to implement the new user interface (UI) in their products. However, the license provides no code of any kind—it is simply a license to various Microsoft patents and other intellectual property rights. Furthermore, developers building products that compete with Office are not eligible.

A Break from the Past

The program provides developers with a license to use Microsoft's intellectual property (IP) related to the new Office UI. (The new UI is described in "Office 2007 Ships with New User Interface".) Microsoft is not providing a specific list of patents or other IP that are covered by the license but says they include pending patent applications on "functional innovations," pending design patent applications on the "original design elements" of the UI, copyright rights to the "creative expression in the visual screen," and trade dress rights to the overall appearance of the UI (to the extent that users recognize it as coming from Microsoft).

Microsoft's rather broad assertion of IP rights to a UI comes as a stark change from the company's position in its 1988 litigation with Apple. In that case, Microsoft successfully argued that Apple could not claim copyright to the overall "look and feel" of the Mac OS. Since that case, however, patents, which provide stronger IP rights than copyright, have become widespread and Microsoft's views appear to have changed as well.

Unlike past releases of Office—which Microsoft allowed developers to freely emulate on the theory that large numbers of third-party applications that look like Office would make the suite more attractive—developers who want to make their applications look like Office 2007 must obtain a free license. Moreover, Microsoft is not providing any code that implements that UI. Developers must create their own implementations. The license merely provides developers the right to use Microsoft's patents. (Although it hasn't said so explicitly, Microsoft presumably believes that it is not possible to implement the Office UI without infringing upon its IP.)

The license is not available to developers creating software products, components, or Web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general function as Word, Excel PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access, or products that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those applications. So products such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, the open-source OpenOffice suites, or Google's online e-mail, spreadsheet, and word processing services are not eligible. Having spent several years developing a new UI, Microsoft now wants to protect that investment by preventing competitors from copying it while at the same time allowing complementary third-parties and partners to use it.

Developers using Office's extensibility features to build solutions that run directly on top of Office do not need a license.

Rules and Restrictions

To obtain a license, developers must agree to a set of rules and restrictions as described in a 120-plus-page document called the "2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface Design Guidelines." The document itself is available only to developers who have completed the license agreement, but a sample that illustrates some of the requirements is available.

The guidelines include requirements that must be followed, those that should be followed, and a list of best practices that aren't required but which, based on Microsoft's experience, help the overall usability of an application.

For example, if developers choose to implement the Ribbon (the element that Office 2007 uses in place of the menu bar), their implementations must change the layout of the controls on the ribbon in real-time as the application window is resized--they cannot wait until the mouse button is released to adjust the placement of the controls. An example of a practice that is not required is the recommendation that the entire Ribbon should completely disappear when the application window is less than 300 pixels by 250 pixels.

For many developers, particularly those building internal applications for their IT organizations, the task of implementing all the requirements may be impractical. Fortunately, several ISVs, such as DevComponents, Infragistics, and Telerik, have licensed the UI with the intention of providing developers with prebuilt implementations that comply with Microsoft's guidelines. However, even developers who use third-party components must obtain a license for the UI from Microsoft.

Resources

The Office 2007 UI Licensing home page is msdn.microsoft.com/officeui.

An excerpt from the Design Guidelines can be found at officeblogs.net/UI/Preview%202007%20Microsoft%20Office%20System%20UI%20Design%20Guidelines.pdf.