Share via

O365 Apps - Getting started

  • Article

I believe that everyone has potential to achieve whatever is it that they want to in their life. All they need is a little bit of guidance and resources. Would you as developer want to be that guiding light which increases a person's productivity and help them achieve their dreams? What kind of apps can you create when you want to create productivity apps? The kind which is called Office 365 apps (aka productivity apps).

There are four ways by which you can get started with O365 app dev:-

1. Office Add-ins = content apps/ task pane apps for Access, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Project and mail apps Outlook. Consumers can avail themselves of these apps from inside the Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc. If you open any word document, and then go to "Insert" at the top menu ribbon and there click on "Store" (store appears in Red color), that's where you application will be visible if you write Office Add-ins.  

2. SharePoint Add-ins = these are of two types: SharePoint hosted and Provider hosted. The difference between these two is that provider hosted apps need to have at-least one component which is hosted externally to the SharePoint subscription or SharePoint farm. SharePoint add-in apps are visible as tiles in the Site Contents page at the SharePoint website.

3. Your app = the apps that you create and connect to office 365 APIs to access your customer's O365 data such as their mail, calendars, contacts, users and groups, files, and folders - right from within your app itself.

4. Mobile apps = use Office 365 APIs in Windows Phone, Android, IOS or Cordova.

Check out the entire list of developer documentation here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office

 

To access the Office 365 APIs you will need to create an office developer account. You can get started with a free trial here : https://bit.ly/1uv0f6l Once the account is created, you can see a page like this. This is the Office 365 admin center.

By now we know what kind of app we want to create and we have our account in place for the REST APIs. Back with the next post with app dev very soon. Ciao!