Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

With the latest updates that have been released recently for Compose apps that are now available in OWA in Office365 and the Office/Exchange 16 preview the ability to extend what your compose apps can do has been greatly enhanced. With version 1.3 of the API you can now save an Item via the saveAsync method https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/mt269096.aspx  . Why this small change is important from an extensibility point of view is that when you save an Item this way, it creates a draft in the Mailbox you activated the compose app from which you can then modify anyway you like using the EWS updateItem operation. (normally you would be restricted in a compose app to just using the subset of properties and methods provided for in the Office.js). One trick however is the ItemId which you need to make an UpdateItem EWS Request to update the Draft Item is still only available in Read Mode. So to get around this I've come up with t...

Mail Apps for Outlook (and OWA) is one of the really cool new features of Exchange 2013.Anybody who has every had to do any OWA customization using forms from Exchange 2003 to 2010 would be glad to see they have finally gone past their used by date and Mail Apps provides the promise of a unified custom app framework across mail clients. At RTM the feature set gap compared to currently what you can do in Outlook Plugins and full access to all EWS operations is substantial (and frustrating) and a show stopper for a lot of good application ideas, but hopefully this will narrow somewhat like a lot of Exchange features when we see new bits and pieces come through in the new cumulative updates.  Mail Apps have three main ingredients A manifest file which is what is used to install a Mail App and contains all the configuration and activation rules for the Mail App A html file that is rendered by the Mail client and controls the display elements. JavaScript files that are bascially t...