Microsoft Office 2013 embraces Web development

08.08.2012
With the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft is encouraging developers and administrators to use open Web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML to build their add-on apps.

Microsoft wanted to "modernize the way the platform is accessed by developers," said Richard Riley, a Microsoft director in the Office division. "We have made some of the most significant changes on the developer side of Office in the last 15 years."

"We saw that people were building a lot of internal and consumer solutions as Web applications because they were easy to deploy. Just set up a server with some HTML pages and everyone could go and get that" app, said Brian Jones, principal group program manager for Microsoft's Office solutions framework team. "That's the model we followed."

For the past 20 years, Microsoft has offered VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as a tool for developers and administrators to add additional functionality into Microsoft Office. While VBA will still be offered in the next version of Office, , Microsoft will also offer the , which uses Web standards such as HTML, CSS, OAuth, REST and Microsoft's own OData.

"There's nothing proprietary or new here. If the developer knows how to write Web apps, they can write Office apps" Riley said.

The company endeavored to apply consistently across Office as well as for SharePoint, for both the hosted and in-house versions of these products. "We focused on having a consistent set of APIs, so a lot of apps built for Word can also run for Excel," Jones said.