Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format 319
protosage writes to tell us that Microsoft Interoperability is working towards opening up Outlook's .pst format under their Open Specification Promise. This should "allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way." "In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. It also will highlight the structure of the .pst file, provide details like how to navigate the folder hierarchy, and explain how to access the individual data objects and properties."
Re:Never even heard of it (Score:5, Informative)
"Data portability has become an increasing need for our customers and partners as more information is stored and shared in digital formats. One scenario that has come up recently is how to further improve platform-independent access to email, calendar, contacts, and other data generated by Microsoft Outlook.
On desktops, this data is stored in Outlook Personal Folders, in a format called a .pst file"
Straight from the link in the summary.
Re:Never even heard of it (Score:2, Informative)
What is .pst used for exactly?
The 'PST' or 'Personal STore' file contains the Outlook/Outlook Express Message Mail Box.
Re:Never even heard of it (Score:3, Informative)
It's MS's overly complicated version of a mail spool file.
Re:Never even heard of it (Score:2, Informative)
Outlook Express never used PST files (but it could import them).
Then explain this (Score:5, Informative)
Um, ok, then explain this
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files [mozillazine.org]
and this
http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/rn01re01.html [five-ten-sg.com]
Re:I don't believe anyone cares (Score:2, Informative)
You can just drag those messages off to another machine running IMAP and then have google pop them off from there.
Re:Never even heard of it (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who cares about PST files anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
.pst is an Outlook message database, not Exchange message database. It doesn't matter where your Exchange is hosted, if you use Outlook to connect to it, it caches local copies [wikipedia.org] of all data you worked with in a .pst file on your machine.
Re:Link to the RFC (Score:4, Informative)
Note that the title of TFS is "Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format", not "Microsoft Opened Outlook's PST Format".
The primary source [msdn.com] says that " documentation is still in its early stages and work is ongoing".
Named Socket interface (Score:3, Informative)
Make your named socket a .pst file and outlook can access your real email database through the defined interface.
Nice and spiffy and you don't end up tied to the Microsoft format.
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Informative)
Reality check:
The PST format is rather useless. You can already access all the data on a Windows machine (which you have already to create it anyway) using Outlook plugins, either a COM Outlook Object Model plugin or a Exchange client plugin, depending on what you need.
So okay, now things like Thunderbird can import the mail from Outlook, which is good for people who use POP3 I guess, IMAP and Exchange store the mail on the server so theirs no real need.
Products won't carry a 'Works with Outlook' sticker because of this, the file is locked when Outlook is open, you you have to use an Outlook plugin if you want to do anything useful with it for normal people who use Outlook.
As someone who writes Outlook plugins for a job, this is rather useless for much other than exporting data from a backup without reinstalling Outlook after a crash of your system.
I.E. useful only in a limited set of circumstances that are really a corner case.
This doesn't do anything for communicating with Exchange, which is really what you want.
Re:Oh no... (Score:2, Informative)
That's entirely incorrect. I can tell you as an insider that MAPI is going nowhere, as MAPI defines Exchange. Outlook 2010 will communicate with Exchange Server via MAPI, as will the version after that.
Exchange Web Services replace WebDAV, which was used by OWA in versions past.
Re:Oh no... (Score:4, Informative)
Grandpa AC is correct.. Microsoft is phasing out MAPI entirely and has already replaced it with an open implementation. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204042(EXCHG.140).aspx [microsoft.com] )
With the advent of Web Services in Exchange 2007 ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb408417.aspx [microsoft.com] ), clients including Outlook are moving to use standard protocols to access Exchange. Outlook 2007 made a huge step towards using HTTP, XML to access Exchange 2007.
Apple's Mail App requires Exchange 2007 because the Mail.app client is using Web Services to access. ( http://images.apple.com/macosx/exchange/docs/MacOSXSL_Exchange.pdf [apple.com] )
Re:Named Socket interface (Score:1, Informative)
Not even in the unholy world of Win32 can you do something so nonsensical: Via MSDN: You cannot use the SetFilePointer function with a handle to a non-seeking device such as a pipe or a communications device.
Re:Oh no... (Score:1, Informative)
Um - dude, SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server - anyone with half a brain can read the schema and everything has been fully documented via the same open protocol specs for more than 2 years now....
Re:I can't help but wonder what their motives are. (Score:3, Informative)
For instance, while the crowd around here celebrates Dell installing Ubuntu on their laptops... that's Dell backstabbing Microsoft. Of course, MS is always the "bad guy" so presenting them as the victim is frowned upon.
Or maybe Intel refusing to upgrade the graphics on many of their platforms to comply with the "Vista ready" status, just so they could make a couple extra bucks while screwing MS. I know, I know, the horror that someone could try to take an unbiased view of the situation!
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Informative)
SharePoint was more open that the PST format was prior to this announcement. The (well documented) SharePoint API [microsoft.com] enables access to all content - it would be relatively trivial to write software that could walk your entire SharePoint content dbs and indeed farm to extract all data out in a way that could easily be implemented in alternative products. I'm sure its been done. Hell, there's software that does the reverse (and I know this being a SharePoint guy) - that use the very same API to insert data into a SharePoint environment from say a Lotus Notes environment. And trust me, you have as much access to write as you do to read data.
Repeat after me - SharePoint does not lock your data up. It implements a reasonably good document management, content management, workflow, "intranet in a box" site - it aint no drupal when looking specifically at CMS, but that's one of the many tools on this swiss army knife. Sure, corporations will be 'locked in' to SharePoint, but that is because the alternatives that come close to doing what it does are woeful (*cough* Lotus Notes). They're locked in to its functionality, which - correct me if I'm wrong - is ultimately what you choose one software product over another on.
Re:SQL Server on the desktop considered harmful (Score:4, Informative)
Then either your app quality or your support skills were lacking. Developers routinely run local copies of SQL server on their development machines without having any issues whatsoever. I ran SQL server 2005 for years on my development machine without even noticing it was running. I currently run SQL Server Express 2008 on my development machine and it runs perfectly. I have also installed SQL Server Express 2008 on 1GHz compact pcs with 512mb ram and 4gb of disk space. The only issue with performing the installation on those was freeing up enough space for the installer to unpack itself and run. Installing SQL server is as simple as clicking next a bunch of times.
A desktop machine/os is so slightly different from a server machine/os that unless you are doing something horribly wrong, there should be no performance/functionality difference between running something like sql server on either of them.
Re:Oh no... (Score:3, Informative)
and "Exchange Web Services" is Patented!
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0113001.html [freepatentsonline.com]
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=846&q=%22Exchange+Web+Services%22+patent+microsoft&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq= [google.ca]