Today’s post was written by Pretish Abraham, principal program manager lead for the Outlook team.
Yesterday, at
Inbox Love, we announced an exciting new opportunity for developers: Apps for Outlook.com. Next spring, Outlook.com will support third-party apps that will allow users to be more productive than ever, and will allow developers to share their app with our 400 million active customers. The best part, you can start building your apps now—for Outlook Web App—and they’ll work with Outlook.com come spring 2015.
So what exactly do we mean by Apps for Outlook.com? Last March, we introduced
Office 365 as a platform for developers, and spoke about our new APIs and tools that let developers build solutions directly into Office 365–making people more productive at work, at home, at school, and on the road. This time, we’re extending the developer opportunity to include Outlook.com support, which will allow our customers to use your apps in their every-day personal life, increasing their productivity even further.
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.
For Outlook.com customers, these apps can be used in any browser without plugins or extensions, and will be available wherever you log in.
We’ll have more news to share on this topic later, including some exciting partners we’re working with. As for right now, we recommend you start building your apps for Outlook Web App (OWA), so they’re ready to launch within Outlook.com next spring!
—Pretish Abraham
