Is it technically possible to use the plugin Microsoft Find Time for an iframe embed to schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting together in a Microsoft Outlook calendar with other accounts using external e-mail addresses?
What other free or commercial tools come to your mind for such a use case, preferrably with location in EU and fully compliant to EU-GDPR with a template of what to add in the data privacy statement.
One tool I already know, but which can't be customized enough for the given use case is Appointlet.
Also, a Microsoft Bookings licence is currently no option.
Are there equal or better alternatives?
Kind regards and thanks,
I am wondering if Microsoft finally allowed for a developers to use the OnSend functionality in the Windows Outlook Client. I know when it came out a while back that was not possible because of permission / security settings. I am in need of this function and want to avoid going back to an old vsto way. Can some one provide some info if its possible now and also point me to some docs.
It is allowed now, but you won't be able to have an addin that requests it in the store.
Well, that's a very important thing, or at least, I think it is, so, please read it carefully.
Introduction
My background is the COM/VSTO land and due to new requirements, I'm slightly merging to office.js.
First, I was very pleased by the concept that unlike Word, Excel & PPT ofiice.js add-ins, Outlook Web Add-ins install directly on the user's exchange inbox, which means: install once, run everywhere. This worked for me very well at the beginning but it quickly turns out, in some situations, to be terrible, or at least in two of my cases.
We have to agree that Outlook Web Addins (and office.js addins in general) are not mature enough to completely replace COM/VSTO/VBA addins. The ONLY clear benefit is the multi-platform support. So, as I already have clients who use COM Outlook addins, which works more than perfect for their needs, they just needed a way to have the same addin on Mac, Web and Mobile, and I spend some time learning how to build addins using office.js and did deliver some good results but after they started using the new addin, some unexpected drawbacks flopped to the surface which made me think twice!
Now, on Windows, we have both addins running for Outlook the COM & Office.js one but as far as I can tell, there is no comparison between the two, the COM addin is far more superior than the equivalent Web Addin. If I have to state ONLY one benefit of COM over office.js in Outlook, I'd say that office.js lacks the support of inboxes that not use Exchange server as a backend, so Gmail, Yahoo and 3rd-party email providers are not supported which is too frustrating and we should keep the COM addin there.
Problem: Below I'll provide two use cases where the Outlook Web Addin is very [un-welcome] with the presence of a COM addin.
Scenario #1
In one addin, we intercept and parse the email before it is sent to see if it will allow Outlook to send it or not. This works perfectly with both, for COM addin we use ApplicationEvents_11_ItemSendEventHandler event and for Web Addin, we use the horribly implemented <Event Type="ItemSend" FunctionExecution="synchronous" FunctionName="checkEmail" />, the terrible weakness in this implementation is, unlike in the COM add-in, you cannot give the user the option to turn ON/OFF this option and they will always have to see the annoying msg, "[You Add-in] is working on your request"
and, in addition to your inability to customize the msg's text shown, you cannot hide it or disable it which results in a bad UX.
To make things even worst, I was expecting that if both addins are there and waiting for the Send Event to intercept, I assumed it's the COM add-in which should receive the event first then when processing it, it will set its Cancel variable to true, this way the Web Add-in won't be aware of the event at all, but, surprisingly, the exact opposite happens, the Web Add-in received the event first, process it and cancel it: event.completed({ allowEvent: true });, while the COM addin was having good dreams.
Scenario #2: Having an addin that acts as a Spellchecker.
While we have full control over the Word editor for [Windows] Outlook, the COM addin provides excellent results, which is not the case in Web Addin where you stick with a custom task pane and provide a minimal user experience that does the very basic things, so, we find ourselves having the two spellcheckers in Outlook one is excellent and the other one is ugly and its presence ONLY makes sense when it runs in Outlook for Mac. For Outlook.com, a chrome extension would be the ideal solution and for mobile, Compose Mode is not supported yet!!
The Question
Having said all the above, hope you didn't skip it, Is there a way to disable a Web Addin for Outlook in Windows and, possibly, Online? In other words, can we SELECT the platforms that are supported by an Outlook Web Addin? or let's say it again, like: can we SELECT the platforms that an Outlook Web Addin existence makes sense?
First of all I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share the detailed feedback. I agree for your specific type of Add-in there might be challenges to provide a better experience, more on this later.
Second, to answer your specific question, no, we dont support a way to disable Add-ins on specific platforms or select the platforms your Web Add-in will be targeting, in Outlook.
That been said, I think you are requesting many features on this post, the right place for this is our uservoice channel.
considerations:
We have a feature than enables COM/Web Add-ins compatibility in
Win32, basically disables the Web Add-in if you have a
still-betterCOM Add-in. You can find the details here.
However, this feature is not yet supported in Outlook (just in
Excel, Word and PPT) but its something we are planning to add. Let
me know if you find this useful, it will solve the issue of
conflicting item sends events you mentioned.
We dont have APIs to
provide rich interaction of the mail content, for a spell checker I
appreciate if you can share that in uservoice.
Hope this helps.
Can I use CalDAV with Outlook without buying additional software?
I found many resources where says, that if you want use CalDAV with Outlook, you need pay. Is it really so?
Outlook does not support CalDAV out of the box, you need a plugin / extra software.
There are commercial offerings for such as well as open source offerings (e.g. you can find https://github.com/aluxnimm/outlookcaldavsynchronizer using a simple search in your favourite search engine).
However, this isn't a programming question and doesn't belong here.
I'm trying to add iCal import support to my existing scheduling application which needs to support Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Writing iCal format is easy, but reading it is another story, mostly trying to convert times to local times with the complex TIMEZONE/TZID/RRULE syntax. Ideally Windows would have a native API for this, but I haven't found one.
I know Outlook 2007+ has an OpenSharedItem function that would work. I don't want to require users to have Outlook installed though, since my application "competes" with Outlook. I thought about writing a web service that would use Outlook on my web server to do this, but I know using Outlook OLE/COM objects from a service has issues, so that probably isn't an option either. I do own about 300 Exchange Server licenses, are there any APIs with Exchange that would maybe work better? I do notice when I email iCal files from GoToMeeting.com they say they were created with "Microsoft CDO for Microsoft Exchange", so I have a feeling they are doing something like this to avoid writing the format themselves.
My application is written in C++ using mostly native Win32 API, but I don't mind creating a .NET DLL for this, or even requiring users to have Internet access so I can post the file to my web server and have it return a converted format my app can use easily. My web server runs on Windows though, so anything Unix-based might be dificult. Other than that, I'm pretty open to options.
Update: I did find CDOEX but as I've never used it before, can anyone tell me where to start and if it can in fact do what I need? I don't really see much about iCal in the docs, and I'd need to install Exchange on my dev PC (not crazy about that) to start playing around with this API.
You can try to use Redemption (I am its author) - it allows to explicitly import iCal files using RDOAppointmentItem.Import(..., olICal).