Microsoft releases iOS and Android SDKs for Office 365 along with fresh API

Microsoft has announced Office 365 SDKs for the iOS and Android platforms. It allows developers to build apps that work with the Office cloud platform. Microsoft has also developed a new api for Office 365 with support for IFTTT.

The SDKs for Android and iOS are intended to take advantage of the new Office 365 API. This allows, for example, e-mails, contacts and documents from the cloud service to be retrieved and edited in mobile apps. An SDK has also been released for the Visual Studio development environment. The iOS SDK supports Objective-C and soon Apple’s programming language Swift, Microsoft promises.

The new Office 365 APIs are based on the REST architecture and provide access to the hundreds of petabytes of data that Microsoft claims are stored on its cloud servers. The API also includes support for IFTTT, an abbreviation for ‘If This Then That’. This is a service that can perform certain operations on the basis of ‘recipes’, for example sending a text message when a specific e-mail arrives in Outlook. The implementation for the ‘linking service’ IFTTT in the API provides access to 130 different Office cloud services, according to Microsoft.

According to Microsoft CEO Nadella, the new Office 365 API is currently one of the most important APIs the company has introduced. Nadella, who spoke at the TechEd Europe meeting in Barcelona, ​​also said that Microsoft will continue to expand the API in the near future. For example, the business social network service Yammer should be supported in the long term.