This is pretty exciting development which came yesterday as Microsoft announced the availability of two new open source projects to facilitate interoperability with Outlook PST files.

Now start your engines and start thinking of solutions that you can build upon it, and some of you who were reverse engineering the PST format and already doing that have a real good news.. as it went official now ;-)

The two open source projects, available on Copeplex under the Apache 2.0 license are the following:

  • The PST Data Structure View Tool (http://pstviewtool.codeplex.com/) is a graphical tool allowing the developers to browse the internal data structures of a PST file. The primary goal of this tool is to assist people who are learning .pst format and help them to better understand the documentation.
  • The PST File Format SDK (http://pstsdk.codeplex.com/) is a cross platform C++ library for reading .pst files that can be incorporated into solutions that run on top of the .pst file format. The capability to write data to .pst files is part of the roadmap will be added to the SDK.

Read more about it here (blog has some videos as well)

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/may10/05-24PSTToolsPR.mspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2010/05/24/two-open-source-projects-to-facilitate-interoperability-with-outlook-pst-data-files.aspx