Posted by William KennedyCorporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms
Many customers today organize their private and professional lives in e-mail, where they routinely store essential data. Microsoft Outlook and similar programs have long since replaced the rolodex or the pocket diary as people’s primary repositories for contacts, photos, calendar items and more. As the tools we use change, so do the reasons we use them. If you’ve ever searched through old e-mail for a friend’s phone number, or if you work within an organization concerned about regulatory and compliance issues, you likely understand why having easy access to the data stored in e-mail files is important.
Given the importance of Outlook and our other high-volume products to computer users we’ve taken great strides to advance their openness and transparency, in keeping with our Interoperability Principles. Today, we have met another milestone on the path toward greater interoperability.
This spring, we released detailed technical documentation for a file format (.pst) used in recent versions of, Microsoft Outlook, our most popular e-mail application. By releasing the technical documentation and protocols for communicating with Outlook data, we are making it easier to enhance corporate compliance, e-Discovery, security, search, and enterprise content management. These types of applications can interoperate with the .pst data, even if they run on other platforms – including those of our competitors. The documentation we have released provides a new way of accessing this data, regardless of whether Outlook is installed.