Buzz Bruggeman is writing an article on Outlook as a platform and looking for feedback. Take a look and let him know what you’re doing within Outlook and what you would like to see. Omar Shahine and Marc Orchant are two of many who have written recently about the value of using additional tools within Outlook. This is obviously a topic we’re very passionate about.
Outlook is for many the single application in which they spend the most time every single day . It’s also increasingly becoming the place where people store their most important information. It only makes sense that Outlook should become a platform for applications that deal with that information. However, to really capitalize on this opportunity, the process of developing applications integrated into Outlook needs to become much smoother. Browser developers acknowledged this in their world and created a plugin architecture designed to let developers easily extend a simple page viewing application into something much broader. Hopefully as more and more software developers focus on building tools within Outlook and increased awareness is given to the concept of using Outlook as a platform, Microsoft will focus on making Outlook a more flexible, open, and stable platform on which to develop additional add-in applications.