By Casper Manes
The three new Microsoft Exchange APIs can handle more than just
emails, are more open-standards friendly and based on REST, and are
simpler to use than EWS.
For years, developers who wanted to work with content in
Exchange mailboxes had many choices available to them. RPC/DCOM,
Exchange MAPI, Outlook MAPI, and WebDAV were all heavily used from
Exchange 2000 up through 2010. Starting with the 2007 edition,
developers also had Exchange Web Services (EWS) to work with, and
of course, since Exchange 4.0 there have always been the tried and
true legacy protocols of SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. But despite all
these choices, there have been some challenges.
With each new version of Exchange, we have seen some of the
older Exchange-centric protocols go away. Even as developments in
Outlook client access protocols proceeded, bringing us first
RPC/HTTP, which we all know and love as Outlook Anywhere, and then
MAPI/HTTP, the older protocols developers have
