We are starting to develop for Office 365

About a couple of weeks ago, Office 365 beta was announced and some lucky ones have already received an invitation to participate in testing. The Russian representative office of Microsoft on this occasion even issued a press release stating that Office 365 will appear in Russia before the end of this year.
It is important to understand that Office 365 is not just a set of ready-made integrated mail and editor applications in the cloud, but also a development platform. In this post, I would like to briefly describe what features are available to programmers in the context of expanding the functionality of Office 365, as well as where to get additional information on how such solutions based on Office 365 can be created.

What can develop and exemplary scenarios

So, probably the most important question, which components of Office 365 at the moment allow to extend the functionality, contain external APIs and are generally accessible to programmers in some way.

SharePoint Online

In the general case, it is possible to develop so-called Sandboxed Solutions - applications in the sandbox that can function on the Office 365 website. A special simplest case of such an application is a web part that operates on the Office 365 website and displays information for the user. An example of the development of such a web part can be found here . Also available is the ability to create software Workflow for the organization of additional workflow schemes. The scenarios are obvious here - if you need a more complex workflow than Office 365 suggests it means you can expand it. Another way to interact with Office 365 is to develop client solutions that work with “web-services api” - the so-called Client Object Model applications. The examples that come with the Training Kit are based on Silverlight and Jscript running on the client and working with Office 365 data. Simple scripts that come to mind are the processing of list data or the loading of files.

Excel and Access

Office 365 has Access and Excel engines. Of course, these are not analogs of full-fledged offline engines, but those opportunities for which they are capable of solving many problems. If you have a need to work with Excel spreadsheets or an Access database located in Office 365, then you can use a set of web services, REST queries and a Jscript-based library. For example, a scenario is possible in which you change the contents of Excel cells from a spreadsheet from Jscript, then the data in this table is recalculated on the Office 365 server side and a part of this table is displayed on a graph on the Office 365 page.
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Lync online

Office 365 has built-in instant messaging, voice and video chat. The existing API allows, for example, to create an alternative client by combining ready-made controls. The main goal is to provide programmers with the ability to create "contextual" applications. An example would be a web part that contains an input field for an instant message, or an even more mundane example — a helpdesk form with a ready-made chat field with an operator and a "call" button.

Exchange online

Office 365 is “built-in” Exchange with which you can interact thanks to the Exchange Web Services Managed API (EWS MA). In general, this API allows you to programmatically create Create Read Update Delete operations with all items stored in Exchange (Appointments, Attachments, Contacts, Emails, Tasks, Public Folders). If you need to import a database of ten thousand contacts into Office 365, please, everything is for this. Additionally, there are pull-notification services. The simplest scenario - a letter arrived in a special box and processed by your robot.

Where to begin

The main source of development information for Office 365:

• Office 365 Development Course ( Office 365 Developer Training Course ) - online tutorial on key development issues.
• Office 365 Development Guide ( Office 365 Developer Training Kit ) - Downloadable Version

This guide contains the supporting information you need to start your solution. The course is still supplemented with information so stay tuned.

Then maybe the question immediately arises - where to try it all and whether you need access to Office 365 beta for this. Answer - no, you do not need access to Office 365 beta to start developing for this cloud solution. To study the Training Kit and examples that go to it you will need a virtual machine that can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

In general, the main software APIs in question have long been available (with some nuances) in Sharepoint, Lync, Exchange products. Those developers who have already created solutions for these platforms are by and large ready to develop for Office 365.

Why develop

According to official information, more than 100,000 organizations have agreed to participate in the testing of Office 365 beta. What can be an indicator of genuine interest in technology. Also, we should not forget that the basic technologies included in Office 365, such as Sharepoint and Exchange, have been used by many companies for many years and have managed to acquire additional scripts, components and solutions.

All these solutions can be claimed to varying degrees in the cloud office, and those developers who will create them for Office 365 will undoubtedly be able to make money on it.

Moreover, Microsoft is committed to ensuring that Office 365 has additional features and solutions, and now there is a pilot in Office 365 Marketplace , an app store and professional services for Office 365. Blog posts have already been published on how to register an application in this store . If you have partner status and you are developing solutions for any technologies included in Office 365 (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange), then it’s probably time to think about registering your application.