GigaOm: Microsoft’s Outlook Opens Up to an Uncertain Future
GigaOm reports that Microsoft is opening up the Outlook PST format to give external access to mail, calendar and contacts. ClearContext CEO Deva Hazarika is quoted:
The announcement makes it sound like this opens up a wide range of ways to extend what people can do with Outlook data. However, if people are actually using Outlook, those files are locked by Outlook and can’t be accessed without using the Microsoft APIs. And even if they could be accessed, I’m not sure what the value prop is in trying to write a better set of access methods than the APIs already in place. So, I don’t think this means very much for “live” instances of Outlook usage.
Read more here.