Outlook.com to Get Third-Party Add-Ins and Apps, Tips Build 2015 Schedule

Microsoft is gearing up to host its annual Build conference starting Wednesday in San Francisco and the company has spilled some details ahead of time. The Redmond giant on its Channel 9 website where it will broadcast the Build 2015 conference has published details on a session on Outlook.com apps.

The listing titled "Build an Add-in for Outlook.com, Outlook and Office 365 that Reaches Over 400 Million Users" informs developers they can create one app that can run across different services including Outlook for desktop, Office 365, and Outlook.com, and that the app will be published in a single store.

Channel 9 further lists Andrew Salamatov, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, as the speaker for the session and the dateline of the session suggest it will be on April 30.

The listing says, "Yes, you read that right - in under 5 minutes, you can build "one" app, list it in "one" store and have it appear in Outlook.com, Outlook desktop and Office 365. We've got many exciting updates since Build 2014 - from apps platform coming to Outlook.com, to simple development tools, to apps now able to place buttons among native Outlook actions. Learn about new capabilities, new UI entry points and best practices for building beautiful and powerful integrations via Apps for Outlook."

It's worth noting that add-ins and apps were available in the Office 365 version of Outlook; though they have been largely targeted at enterprise audience. From the Channel 9 listing, it appears that Microsoft finally will allow third-party developers to create services (add-ins and apps) for Outlook.com.

Microsoft is also expected to reveal universal app platform technical details at its Build Conference. The company alongside is also likely to release more code samples for developers at the conference scheduled from Wednesday.