14 DAY TRIAL // New resources are available for third-party developers that want to make sure their solutions play nice with Microsoft’s Office suite in heterogeneous environments. At the end of the past week, the Redmond company announced that it had published additional documentation detailing file formats and protocols used by the Office System. Paul Lorimer, group manager, Microsoft Office Interoperability, notes that the release of the new documents is another step further from the Redmond giant in supporting interoperability between Office and third-party solutions. Specifically, new documentation was made available for Office 2010, which is expected to be launched in mid-June 2010.
“In July 2009, when Office 2010 was still in technical preview, we published thousands of pages of detailed technical documentation for the protocols used by our products to communicate with Office 2010,” Lorimer stated. “This enabled third parties to develop software that interoperates with Office 2010, informed by how other Microsoft products do so, while Office 2010 was still several months away from broad release. Today, as promised, we added thousands more pages to the canon. The addition of this new documentation will help other vendors bring interoperable products to market faster, increasing customer choice and satisfaction and driving better business results.”
At the same time, the resources published last week are designed to offer insight on the file formats and protocols already in use in existing versions of Office, such as Office 2007. Case in point, Microsoft is now providing fresh documentation for Outlook files. According to Lorimer, the latest Outlook interoperability documentation is designed to increase the level of support for data portability.
“One particular request we’ve heard is for improved access to email, calendar, contacts, and other data generated by Microsoft Outlook. On desktops, this data is stored in Outlook Personal Folders, in a format called a .pst file. Last fall we promised to release documentation that would make it easier for developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files across a variety of platforms, using the programming language of their choice. After seeking input on the documentation from the community, today we delivered on that promise,” Lorimer added.
Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.