Office 365 Platform for Developers

  • Article

Hello Microsoft Gulf Technical Community, this is my first blog to the community and I hope I'm able to add value to our fast growing technical community.

Last week saw the arrival of Office 365 summit to Dubai. The summit was part of the Office 365 world tour. The summit had some great content for our developer community and I hope some of you got a chance to attend the event.

Around the globe, 1 billion Office users spend an average of2-3 hours each day in Office clients, with more than 400 petabytes of data hosted in the Office 365 service. If you're a web developer, the Office 365 platform gives you the opportunity to reach these users with your business solutions, automate the day-to-day solutions, and even create custom solutions.

Development for Office 365 opens new doors for our developer community. So what can you build?

  • Contextual Apps:
    • Build apps that extend the familiar Office and Office 365 experience across desktop, web, and mobile platforms.
    • Surface your services and data in the most widely-used productivity platform on the planet.

One fine example this is the DocuSign Apps for Office 365. DocuSign has made its industry-leading eSignature apps widely available to businesses and consumers within Microsoft Office 365, including Outlook, SharePoint, and Word. More details here: https://www.docusign.com/microsoftapps. There are many other great examples of contextual apps for Office 365.

 

  • Robust API's:
    • Build custom solutions across all mobile, web and desktop platforms that connect to Office 365.
    • Connect to open Office 365 APIs to access documents, search, mail, social, calendar, people information, and the petabytes of data that are stored there.
    • Use industry open standards such as OAuth and OData.

 

  • Flexible tools:  
    • You can build using any web language including JavaScript, HTML5, Python, Ruby, PHP, and ASP.NET. Use Visual Studio or any IDE of your choice.
    • Host your apps on Microsoft Azure or a cloud platform of your choice.

 

Want to learn more? Here are some excellent resources if you would like to learn more about Office 365 Development: