Fact or myth: OL & Exchange API's to go away?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff Vandervoort
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J

Jeff Vandervoort

I have a client who will not invest in 3rd party products for Exchange or
Outlook because he says he read "somewhere, recently" that MS will be
removing APIs like .NET, CDO, Automation & the Outlook object model from
future versions. He says this is to increase security, but it would
obviously prevent 3rd party development, and kill an entire segment of the
IT industry.

I can't blame him for his reluctance to buy OL addins if that's true, but I
keep up on IT issues and I've not read anything to that effect. It seems
something like that would be pretty big news! Did I miss something?
 
Jeff Vandervoort said:
I have a client who will not invest in 3rd party products for Exchange or
Outlook because he says he read "somewhere, recently" that MS will be
removing APIs like .NET, CDO, Automation & the Outlook object model from
future versions. He says this is to increase security, but it would
obviously prevent 3rd party development, and kill an entire segment of the
IT industry.

I can't blame him for his reluctance to buy OL addins if that's true, but I
keep up on IT issues and I've not read anything to that effect. It seems
something like that would be pretty big news! Did I miss something?
Click to expand...

I haven't seen a public announcement either. All I can envision is that in
the future we will see COM (component object model - that includes CDO 1.21
and the classic Outlook Object Model) support going away in favor of .NET
based managed code classes like the Visual Studio Tools for Office already
introduced for Word and Excel 2003 (and I'm sure PowerPoint and Access will
follow in the next version of Office).
 
We don't know what will happen when Outlook moves to the SQL server
based store in the Longhorn/Yukon time frame but I've heard nothing
about deprecating all programmatic access to Outlook, and backwards
compatibility is usually a priority where possible.

I haven't stopped writing addins for Outlook...
 
Thanks, guys, for your perspectives. Hard to predict the future in this
business, but it sure seems unlikely to me that they'd pull the plug on
these APIs that have contributed to Exchange's success.
 
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