Microsoft Adaptive Cards Let You Interact Inside Email

Announced at Build 2018 in May, Adaptive Cards in Outlook let developers present actionable information panels and even support payments inside the email reader.

- Michael Muchmore

I attended a session at the conference titled “Adaptive Cards in Bots, Windows, Outlook and your own applications,” hosted by David Claux and Matt Hidinger, the principal program managers at Microsoft who run the Adaptive Cards project. A key takeaway is that Adaptive Cards are not Outlook-only, and they’re not even limited to Microsoft’s platform.

Built using open-source code available on GitHub, Adaptive Cards will display on the web, in chatbots, on Android and iOS mobile OSes, and via voice with Cortana. Claux and Hidinger started with a demo of a scuba company that wanted to present an interactive Card asking users where they want to dive, when, and how many people would be coming. Customers could then book a dive using the Card, see a receipt for the trip, and even chat with the proprietors.

First, the pair showed their Card on a pretend dive company’s website. You can see it in the lower-right corner here:

Next, they showed the Card as it would appear in Outlook:

Next came the Cortana view (lower left). The words Cortana speaks can be different from the text displayed on the Card: