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Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format
protosage writes to tell us that Microsoft Interoperability is working towards opening up Outlook's .pst format under their Open Specification Promise. This should "allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way." "In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. It also will highlight the structure of the .pst file, provide details like how to navigate the folder hierarchy, and explain how to access the individual data objects and properties."
(1) They feel that Outlook is genuinely capable of withstanding competition from the likes of TBird and other competitors, and to be fair, the quality of Outlook has improved a lot. .pst specs.
(2) They feel that opening Outlook's specs will give them access to iPhone app-store like ingenuity from the "crowd" (throw in your favorite buzzword here). Basically, let the hackers go at it and come up with neat little means to improve Outlook usability. If more products carry a "Works with MS Outlook" sticker, that can only be good for outlook (in one line of reasoning).
(3) All the old, seasoned outlook engineers have retired or died, and they're hoping that someone can figure out the
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Um, ok, then explain this
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files
and this
http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/rn01re01.html
Count me as one who cares. I've had .pst file of old outlook mail sitting around for at least seven years waiting for this kind of news. Being able to import it directly into gmail would be very useful.
Its good to see Microfsoft open up the Outlook PST format, if only to improve importing into other mail clients like Thunderbird etc.
But honestly, using the PST format in other applications sounds like a terrible idea to me: Those monolithic PST files, which Outlook uses to store mail data get corrupted easily (at least in my experience) and storing all your email data in one gigantic file always struck me as a really bad design choice anyway.
Expanding on point 2, Microsoft may want to open up the MAPI specs a little more for the benefit of iPhones and the like. At $DAYJOB, we have Exchange 2003 and a number of users with iPhones and we've seen some bizarre things happen on occasion with calendar entries (weirdness when one of a number of repeating appointments is changed or cancelled and not showing up as changed or removed on the iPhone, that kind of thing). While I'm prepared to believe that it's partially to do with Apple testing more thoroughly with and developing against Exchange 2K7, I can't help but feel that a better understanding of how Outlook communicates with Exchange and a better understanding of how Outlook represents the data internally would help other developers produce something that works better with Exchange.
And that could well be Microsoft's strategy...domination at mail-and-collaboration server end. If they open up the client specs a little more, and that makes Exchange 2010 and beyond more attractive, they've won.
They're switching to OpenPST files (.pstx)
.pst is an Outlook message database, not Exchange message database. It doesn't matter where your Exchange is hosted, if you use Outlook to connect to it, it caches local copies of all data you worked with in a .pst file on your machine.
Let me add another reason:
(5) They don't care about the outlook format because Sharepoint is the new closed format. They don't care if your outlook mailboxes (or .doc or anything else) is in an open format because you put it all in sharepoint. You still can read your mailbox with another program, but because the "metadata" of your IT infrastructure (which isn't a single file, but a lot of files with owners and relationships between all them) is stored in sharepoint you're tied to it for the eternity. This is a brilliant move - Microsoft can convice governments that their outlook and office and all their apps are using open formats, but no government will ask about the openness of sharepoint because it's not an application that reads some kind of document.
Reality check:
The PST format is rather useless. You can already access all the data on a Windows machine (which you have already to create it anyway) using Outlook plugins, either a COM Outlook Object Model plugin or a Exchange client plugin, depending on what you need.
So okay, now things like Thunderbird can import the mail from Outlook, which is good for people who use POP3 I guess, IMAP and Exchange store the mail on the server so theirs no real need.
Products won't carry a 'Works with Outlook' sticker because of this, the file is locked when Outlook is open, you you have to use an Outlook plugin if you want to do anything useful with it for normal people who use Outlook.
As someone who writes Outlook plugins for a job, this is rather useless for much other than exporting data from a backup without reinstalling Outlook after a crash of your system.
I.E. useful only in a limited set of circumstances that are really a corner case.
This doesn't do anything for communicating with Exchange, which is really what you want.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It's precisely because .pst doesn't matter that much, but the client-server protocol does, that MS is opening.... the .pst format, not the protocol.
You'll be able to manipulate the data locally, but as soon as you want to send it to or from the server, you'll need exchange/outlook.
nothing to see.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
*sigh*
SharePoint was more open that the PST format was prior to this announcement. The (well documented) SharePoint API enables access to all content - it would be relatively trivial to write software that could walk your entire SharePoint content dbs and indeed farm to extract all data out in a way that could easily be implemented in alternative products. I'm sure its been done. Hell, there's software that does the reverse (and I know this being a SharePoint guy) - that use the very same API to insert data into a SharePoint environment from say a Lotus Notes environment. And trust me, you have as much access to write as you do to read data.
Repeat after me - SharePoint does not lock your data up. It implements a reasonably good document management, content management, workflow, "intranet in a box" site - it aint no drupal when looking specifically at CMS, but that's one of the many tools on this swiss army knife. Sure, corporations will be 'locked in' to SharePoint, but that is because the alternatives that come close to doing what it does are woeful (*cough* Lotus Notes). They're locked in to its functionality, which - correct me if I'm wrong - is ultimately what you choose one software product over another on.