Last year during Build 2015, Microsoft made the pitch that its shared services and favorite apps would evolve into platforms with the help of its developers and partners. A year later, Microsoft took Day Two of its Build 2016 conference to show glimmers of its platform transition.
During the Office 365 portion of presentations at Build 2016, Qi Lu, the executive vice president of Applications and Services Group in Microsoft and Yina Arenas the senior PPM manager at Microsoft brought up a beloved partner in Starbucks to showcase Office Add-ins.
Office Add-ins offer an added level of extensibility to the Office platform that allows users to do even more from within the Office ecosystem and today, Starbucks demoed an Add-in that would allow Office users to send gift cards and deep links into app resources to Office and non-Office users.
Another feature of the Starbucks Add-in is the ability co-ordinate meetings around local Starbuck locations by sending mapping information from the Outlook app. Starbucks is just one of many; that will be adding extensible functionality to the Office platform shortly according to the Office team.
