Microsoft provides cross-platform APIs for Office 365 devs

Microsoft has launched a new interoperability initiative for Office 365 that lets developers hook up their Google Android and Apple iOS apps to its online productivity suite services and data.

Launched at the TechEd Europe developers conference, Microsoft said new Office 365 application programming interfaces (APIs) were now available for mail, calendar and contacts access.

Over 400 petabytes of data and popular Office 365 services can be used in any iOS, Android, Windows and web application through the APIs, Microsoft claimed.

Source: Microsoft

As part of the cross-platform drive, Microsoft is also releasing a production version of its Office 365 software development kit (SDK) for Android along with a completely new variant of the same for Apple's iOS mobile operating system.

The Github-hosted SDKs are open source, Microsoft said.

They contain five independent packages that provide access to files stored on OneDrive, directory services via Azure Active Directory Graph, SharePoint Lists, base URLs for services, and create, retrieve, update and delete (CRUD) operations for Outlook mail, calendar and contacts from Office 365 Exchange Online.

Microsoft said it would support Apple's new Swift coding language soon with the SDK, which currently uses Objective-C.

The company said Office 365 has 3.4 million developers currently, with over 1200 apps available in the public Office Store.