Office 365 SDK and integration 3rd party apps and extensions

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votes

I am the "lone wolf" kind of developer, but I have never actually encountered Office 365 / Sharepoint installations.

However, I have a potential customers that uses Office 365 heavily. This customer would like to have their employees have an app that

  • Integrates/retrieves existing cleandar, email, contacts etc.
  • Adds additional functionality that integrates with it.

I have found Office 365 SDKs for REST, Android and iOS, so I suspect this is possible to some degree.

I will need to get Office365/Sharepoint myself, so I can run tests etc, but for now, I am trying to determine if what the customer wants is at all possible. Hence, I have two questions:

1) For above to work the customer has to store all their data and users in the cloud? (Supposedly an EU server since I am from EU.) Or can the customer also host and run their own server that the apps can integrate with while the rest of their usage is for intranet? (The reason I ask is that some REST code examples I have seen use https://outlook.office365.com/api/ address.)

2) Is it possible to add functionality to an Office 365/Sharepoint server that integrates with the rest of the API? (i.e. so my apps can contact the customer-self-hosted-server or the cloud-server and retrieve/store custom data)

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androidiossharepointoffice365office365-apps
I am mainly interested in if Office 365 wih Sharepoint can be used as a platform where I can add database tables and information and using HTTP/REST/authentication get and store data. If the solution is hosted by other or the customer himself is secondary (at least assuming the tools necessary do so are provided like IIS) - however, I don't think O365/SharePoint can be used as a "platform" as I hoped, but I would appreciate if anyone could ell me otherwise / point me in he righ direction – Tom

1 Answers

1
votes

1) The Office 365 APIs are meant to give you access to data stored in O365 tenants. You can't host Office 365 on your own server, but you can host Exchange and SharePoint on your own servers. O365 is essentially hosted versions of those programs - plus a subscription to the Office applications. 2) If you are hosting your own email data or documents then you need to use the APIs specific for those applications (i.e. Exchange or SharePoint Web Services).