New Office 365 as a platform for developers for Windows, Android, iOS and Web


    In the calendar of the evangelist, Microsoft TechEd is always marked especially, because this conference is about the future of both the company and the industry as a whole. TechEd Europe 2014, which took place last week in Barcelona, ​​as expected, is full of announcements and new solutions, with the main news for me related to Office 365.

    Firstly, OneDrive for Office 365 users became unlimited and at no extra cost .

    Secondly, the new built -in Mobile Device Management (MDM) for Office 365 functionality, which is very important for business data security, will be added . MDM will enable IT administrators to centrally manage smartphones and tablets, including iOS, Android and Windows Phone. This functionality will be available in the first quarter of 2015.

    But the most long-awaited news is related specifically to the development for Office 365. The platform development team expressed this in one phrase:

    Write once, run anywhere


    To do this, an ecosystem has been created around Office 365, which includes the following innovations:
    • Office 365 APIs for working with Mail, Files, Calendars and Contacts
    • SDKs for developing native applications
    • Developing applications for Office and the ability for developers to access applications using the Office 365 app launcher


    New Office 365 API


    To work with the new Office 365 API, open standards REST, OData and Oauth are used. Today it is possible to use more than 400 petabytes (valid as of March 2014) of information located in Office 365. At this stage, the platform provides access from your applications to Mail, Files, Calendars and Contacts.
    In the near future, the Office 365 team promises to provide access to Tasks, Yammer, and Office Graph.



    You can find code examples for working with the API here: https://github.com/OfficeDev

    New Android, iOS, and Visual Studio SDKs for Office 365


    The development team, providing access to Office 365 services, has created a set of development tools for Android , Visual Studio , SDK for iOS , which supports Objective-C and Swift in the near future.


    Office Application Development


    Gone are the days when we used intricate VBA or Com add-ins to develop for Office. Now Office can be installed either on an iPad, Android or just in the form of a Web application, which corresponds to Run Anywhere. But what about Write Once?
    The answer is obvious: using open standards HTML5, CSS3, JS, REST for user interfaces.

    The platform allows you to develop three types of applications for Office:
    • Task pane app: Office-integrated (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) application that interacts with selected information in a document
    • Content app: Office-integrated application for visualizing data, media and other types of external content
    • Mail app: an integrated application in Outlook (Exchange 2013 or Exchange Online) that interacts with the content in the email, as well as scheduling appointments

    Development for Office 365 allows you to choose tools, platforms and languages ​​such as Ruby, C, .NET, Java, Python, PHP and others.

    For simplicity and convenience of creating applications for Office and SharePoint, Microsoft suggests using the built-in tool in Office 365 - Napa . Like Napa, the Office 365 app launcher is part of the platform, this functionality provides users and developers with customized access to installed applications.


    An example of using Napa to develop a Mail application


    A set of ready-made scripts for developing applications for Office




    HTML, javascript development and publishing is done without leaving Office 365




    An example of what a finished application looks like in Outlook




    Additional Resources




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