On October 26, Microsoft officials announced they had been organizing to open up the Outlook Private Folders .PST file format and making it freely (and securely) licensable. What no one has stated so far is why is Microsoft doing this now and who will probably advantage from your move.
The file formats are on account of be printed in the 1st 50 percent of 2010. Based on Network Globe, the Redmondians are publishing only documentation for your .PST format for Outlook 2010, not prior variations of Outlook.
Microsoft officials are stating the decision to post the documentation for your .PST file format arrived from buyers and partners. When I asked right now what led to the choice to open the file formats, I obtained back the subsequent statement attributable to Paul Lorimer,
Windows 7 Ultimate Key, Group Supervisor, Microsoft Office Interoperability:
“Data portability has become an increasing need for our customers and partners as more information is stored and shared in digital formats. Customers had been specifically asking for solutions to further improve platform-independent access to email, calendar, contacts,
Office 2007 Key, and other data generated by Microsoft Outlook.”
I asked my followers on Twitter this morning if anyone out there was interested in using the .PST documentation for their own purposes. Not that this was a definitive or scientific survey by any means, but I got no responses — other than a few people speculating that Google or Facebook might want to take advantage of the new open format to make their wares more Outlook-compatible.
I asked a couple of analysts for their take on why Microsoft might be opening the .PST format. Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft,
Windows 7 Serial, sent me the subsequent response via e-mail:
“I suspect this choice arrived out of the European Union interoperability investigation. That investigation was launched in Jan. 2008 and covers the Office file formats and more generally, how interoperability affects competition with high-volume Microsoft products like Office. Microsoft seems to be moving toward a settlement that would close the investigation. The competition commissioner has mentioned she would like to wrap her investigations into Microsoft before she leaves her post, and Microsoft would be happy if she pulled it off.”
Helm said he expected some of Microsoft’s competitors might want to make use of the newly documented formats.
“The big winners (from Microsoft’s move to open .PST), will be vendors who want to compete with
Exchange or Outlook. A lot of Outlook e-mail is lying around in .PST files, and competitors will be able to pick off users more easily if they can bring that mail into their own systems. The winners might include IBM Lotus,
Office Professional 2007, Oracle, and Google, and Cisco (which bought PostPath, an Open Source Exchange competitor).”
Helm added that he believed Microsoft is trying to wean large clients from storing mail in .PST files or file systems “given that doing that makes it hard for organizations to back again up all their e-mail, enforce e-mail retention policies, and locate relevant e-mails during legal discovery.” He added that he doubted that this was the main reason Microsoft opened the format.
Rob Sanfilippo, another Directions on Microsoft analyst had some related observations. Sanfilippo noted that there are already a lot of third-party tools that access .PSTs and do things like repair and ennumeration through their contents, “so the format has been reverse-engineered long before being published by Microsoft.”
Sanfilippo added that .PSTs “are used most frequently for archiving purposes and Exchange Server 2010 includes a new server-based Personal Archive feature that gives users a separate mailbox to use for archiving on the server instead of using a PST.” He mentioned this gives weight towards the aforementioned idea that Microsoft is trying to help organizations get users off PSTs and onto server storage.”
There’s nothing shameful about Microsoft opening up its Outlook formats in the hopes of appeasing antitrust regulators (if this is, indeed,
Windows 7, why the Softies are performing this). But if this is the reason, why not say so, instead of leaving us skeptics to piece together later the real reasons behind their open promises?
Update (October 29): It took a couple of days, but Microsoft officials are now stating that the company never discussed the opening of the PST format with the European regulators. When I asked two days ago whether there was an antitrust connection, a spokesperson stated that Microsoft had no comment. But currently, the spokesperson mentioned it was nothing other than customer and partner requests that led towards the decision and not anything or anyone connected with the EU antitrust case.
Microsoft clients, partners and competitors out there: Do you care about the opening up of the .PST format? Why or why not?