Outlook 2007 Consolidates APIs

The Outlook 2007 object model will deliver capabilities that previously required developers to use other APIs, simplifying programming and deployment for developers and maintenance for Microsoft.

Previous versions of the Outlook object model were missing some basic capabilities, such as the ability to retrieve an Exchange user’s Internet e-mail (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP) address, and the ability to detect and respond to changes to mail items in the Outlook store. To accomplish these tasks, developers had to resort to a variety of APIs, including Collaboration Data Objects (CDO), the Exchange Client Extensions (ECE), and the Messaging API (MAPI). Developers also had to resort to scripting languages (such as JScript) to add code to Outlook forms.

Using multiple APIs and languages complicated programming. It also meant that developers had to ensure that the correct version of every API was present on every target machine for their applications, a particular problem for CDO. All of these problems affect not only developers who use the APIs directly but also developers working in C# and recent versions of Visual Basic, who access the APIs indirectly through Primary Interoperability Assemblies (PIAs).