The Future of Exchange's Developer APIs

Jason Henderson, the lead PM for Exchange Web Services, just put up a roadmap for the future of development against Exchange. Key points:

  • WebDav, Store Events, CDOEX and ExOleDB all say hasta la vista in the next version of Exchange. Universal replacement: Exchange Web Services
  • MAPI's not dead yet. The Exchange team's going to stop working on MAPI client binaries, but the server itself remains a MAPI server. Outlook will still use MAPI to talk to the server and you can too. You'll just be using Outlook's libraries or the raw ROPS.
  • CDO.dll is practically dead. This binary has always been owned by the Exchange team. Even when Outlook shipped a version, it was built by Exchange. Now is the time to start migrating those CDO based apps!

I've been playing with the next release of Exchange Web Services here and I gotta say the updates they have planned are pretty sweet. This API is well on it's way towards being a complete replacement for MAPI.