Microsoft Opens Up Outlook to Third-Party App Developers
Microsoft is opening its business-centric Office service to developers on a large scale this time around. Earlier this year, the software giant invited developers to make third-party apps for Office 365, and now that plan includes Outlook.com.
A new suite of APIs, which will soon be released by the company, will give developers tools to integrate into Microsoft’s webmail service and add features to everything from the Calendar to the Compose screen and Contacts. However, these apps won’t come to mainstream until spring 2015. Anyhow, the plan of the company to bring third-party apps holds some exciting promise and possibilities.
The company’s official blogpost reads : “Think about it: Whenever a customer reads or composes an email or calendar event, your app could be there, helping them get the job done. If you have a great idea for how our customers should interact with their email or calendar, now is the time to make it happen. Not only are these apps simple to build–they use open web technologies such as HTML and Javascript–but you can start building them today. To learn how to get started, check out ‘Mail apps for Outlook’ on MSDN and the Office Dev Center.”
Along with this, ‘Mail apps for Outlook’, which work on Exchange 2013, Outlook 2013, Outlook Web Access, and OWA for Devices, will soon work on too, bringing together some 400 million potential new users of app developers, and all without browser plugins or extensions.
Developers may come up with some truly useful apps that plug into not only Outlook.com, but also the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint. According to Microsoft, these apps will be cross-platform.
