Picture This: The Art Curator Story

My name is Brian Melton and I work on the Office 365 Developer Documentation Team. We’ve been building lots of cross-platform code samples on GitHub, ranging from simple authentication samples to complete showcase apps that demonstrate the power of the Office 365 APIs. Today I’ll discuss our new showcase app, Art Curator. We've made versions of it for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and AngularJS — we’ve also prepared an introductory video. The app demonstrates how to access your email using Exchange Online and the Office 365 APIs.

Image first email scenario

Suppose I own a t-shirt printing shop. I’m not much of an artist, so I’m interested in connecting with some local artists and sourcing my screen prints from them. After I hung up a few posters outside the coffee shop of my local art college, my email inbox has become inundated with submissions from would-be t-shirt artists.

I need a way to quickly vet these submissions. For submissions I like, I’d like to answer the artist quickly with some contact information so that we can get together and negotiate a sale. For submissions I wish to decline, I’d like to be able to get back to those authors quickly too — albeit, with a different message.

An image, a description, and an author: this simple recipe works really well for social image sharing platforms, but these platforms aren't right for my business. I can’t negotiate sales and provide my contact information in public forums.

The Art Curator sample app demonstrates how to leverage the cross- platform support of Office 365's APIs and client libraries to build unique and powerful solutions to fill gaps in your line of business. Furthermore, thanks to Office 365’s service oriented architecture you can rely on the services regardless of platform.

The Art Curator sample provides an attachment-first view of your email; the images, the focal point of my business, are front and center. Reviewing and following up with an artist takes just seconds.

SDKs to bootstrap your development process

In addition to our REST APIs, we’ve provided client SDKs for iOS, Android, and Windows. These libraries aim to do the heavy lifting for you! No parsers to write, no futzing with low-level HTTP plumbing — just include the Podfile, Gradle dependency, or NuGet package you require in your project’s dependencies and start working with Office 365.

These SDKs are constantly being improved, tested and iterated. Your feedback helps us determine where to focus our effort, what to improve, and what to reimagine.

Reference implementation apps

To demonstrate the power and multiplatform support of Office 365 and client SDKs, we’re developing and supporting open source samples on GitHub to help you get started. We have lots of useful snippets, starter-projects, and documentation to help you.