Microsoft has taken a page from the Google playbook by actively embracing the webmaster and developer community with its Toolbox portal.

The Toolbox is really just a collection of existing tools that links to important resources, but it's good to see Microsoft take such an open approach with the search engine optimization and developer industry from the outset.

Bing™ Webmaster Center Tools enables site owners to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of sites, submit sitemaps and view statistics about their sites. Webmasters can also review data on how many pages of their site(s) have been indexed, backlinks, inbound links and keyword performance. There is also a new Bing API Web Page Error toolkit that features an improved architecture, and easier deployment. Webmasters are also able to remediate detected malware.

Developers will also find the Bing Toolbox an important resource for requesting and managing an AppID to receive programatic access to Bing when building or enhancing a site or applications.