Announcing the new https://dev.office.com

 

We continue to make progress in unifying our platform and providing one consistent experience for developers across our various workloads, and today we are excited to announce the launch of a newly streamlined Office Dev Center (https://dev.office.com).

The site has been redesigned to help developers of Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync find top development tasks, including information, resources, and tools for app development in the cloud.

 Here's a screenshot of what the new site looks like:

The previous MSDN experience was the result of various projects and technologies growing somewhat independently, and as a result, we were maintaining six different developer centers dedicated to various Office products and the cloud app model. In this redesign, we've consolidated 198 landing and resource pages from across six sites into 25 strategically curated pages.

The new experience is much closer to the way that we on the engineering team vision the platform moving forward. I've stressed a number of times the importance of having one unified model that includes rich client extensibility, powerful server/service integration, and deep alignment with Azure for the application hosting and lifecycle management.

I'm a huge fan of the new experience, as it does a great job setting us up for the new unified model, while also keeping a grounded connection to the existing technologies so many people have made significant investments in (like COM add-ins for the rich clients and full trust code in SharePoint).

There are also some nice improvements from a user experience point of view. The navigation is very clean, and one key highlight many of the early previewers called out is the clean, top-to-bottom layout for better readability and display on tablets.

This redesign appears not only on the English (US) site, but has also been localized for 10 languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazil, Russian, Chinese (simplified and traditional).

We'd love your feedback on this new single entry point for Office developers, so feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.

About the author: Brian Jones is the principal GPM of the Office Development Platform.