Documentation and the publishing of the .pst format can open entirely new feature sets for the programs like search tools for mining the mailboxes for the relevant corporate data, some of the new security tools which can scan the .pst data for malicious software, or the e-discovery tools for meeting up the compliance regulations as said by the Microsoft officials.

The documentation would be explaining that how to parse the content of the PST files. It will also detail on how to store the data, along with the guidance for accessing data from other applications. This is so designed in order to give the knowledge to the programs that how to read the Outlook data that is stored on the user desktops.

Paul Lorimer, the group manager for the interoperability of Microsoft Office has said that one can also imagine it as used for the possibility of data portability into the cloud. He further said that a user may have the data on a hard drive, which they want to migrate to the cloud service. It would allow the developers of the cloud service to write the code on the server so that someone can upload the .pst and also read it on the server rather than running Outlook on the client and then getting the data through that.