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Retirement of EWS
Question asked by Roger - 9/19/2023 at 11:07 AM
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Derek Curtis Replied
Employee Post Marked As Answer
This has been a known thing on our end for some time.

This will essentially only impact those who use Microsoft online services, primarily Office 365, but we will need to update our migration tools by the time this takes effect.

The bigger concern, Microsoft is showing their hand for the future and it’s not the Microsoft we are all used to working with.

It started with delays to Exchange on-prem, talk about changing Exchange on-prem to subscription pricing (which they've backtracked on for now), their acquisition of Accompli and how communication is starting to move through Microsoft servers (e.g., "verifying" clicked links in Teams and Outlook). It culminates with a closed system where everything goes through their servers when using desktop or mobile Outlook’s, regardless of where you are hosting your email.

That said, not much will change on our end and EWS will still be supported in perpetuity.

But, in the very near future, we will be announcing methods for email users to enhance the reliability, security, and functionality not only to SmarterMail but clients you want to use with SmarterMail.

All these changes at Microsoft and Google, trying to prevent customers from accessing their data and in some ways making it extremely difficult to move from their services, make being in the mail server business a very good thing moving forward. We're actually looking forward to the implications of the decisions they're making. 
Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Eric Tykwinski Replied
Derek,

Thanks for the response, I just posted and deleted the same article.
Doesn't sound like EWS is going to be supported forever however, I would say 3 years for their estimate, but it might hit snags for MS to implement to O365, and probably another 3-5 years for them to expire Exchange APIs in Desktop/Cloud Outlook.  Have you guys started looking at GraphAPI, and is it even able to be licensed?

Obviously, this really isn't something to do with you guys as developers, but more with integrating with Microsoft products which is a "blackbox" that hopefully they are willing to give more information to if you sign a bunch of NDAs, so I'm not hoping for much.  Seriously, if you could even give a thumbs up or down, it's probably irrelevant from a purchasing decision, but that, at least you know of what's going on and working on it is good news to me.

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