In an announcement recently at TechEd Europe, Microsoft announced new APIs that will extend the abilities of developer’s apps to work with Office 365. The new APIs will allow apps to tap into Office 365 platform which is used by millions of consumers and over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies who are already using Office 365.
Specifically they announced 3 new capabilities that developers will be able to utilize.
- General availability of new Office 365 APIs for files, mail, contacts and calendar
- New mobile SDKs for native app development
- Visibility for developer’s apps through the new Office 365 app launcher
The new APIs are REST-based allow all developers to use more than 400 petabytes of data (per March 2014) and other well-known services across Office 365 in any app. An example would be a commerce app that requires contact and/or calendar info from Office 365 to fill an order. The new APIs will open up what developers can do with their apps with the Cloud-based services, the possibilities are endless, creating a more powerful Microsoft presence within Android.
This will open up many uses for applications, increase accessibility and raise user subscriptions for Microsoft. Since many households use Windows as their main OS of choice, this change may be just what they need to blend the mobile platform they love with the Office 365 services they use at home or the office. With the recent announcement from Microsoft regarding unlimited OneDrive cloud storage for Office 365 customers, this may create a much more open user experience and create tough competition for Google Apps. Although many love the services of Google apps, the comfort of using Microsoft Office 365 is deeply rooted as well as relieves some security concerns they may have using Google.