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.
Related
Is it possible to add a sub-task to Outlook, or do we need an additional addin to do so?
I tried to look into it, but I couldn't find any information about it.
Web add-ins don't provide anything for creating new items in Outlook. You may consider using EWS from a web add-in, see Call web services from an Outlook add-in for information. Also you may consider using the Graph API, see Build Office Add-ins with Microsoft Graph. This is a preferred and recommend way of doing that.
I have an Office Word add-in that I wish to make it work with Office Word 2016 for Mac. I tried looking into official Microsoft documentation and could not find anything. I want to reuse as much code as possible while still having the extension to work with older versions of Word as well as Office Word 2016.
Is there any way to do this? Any help, even if it is something remotely related to this is appreciated.
TL;DR;
There is no way to do that.
Microsoft has bet on a new technology suite also called Office add-ins but web based. They are compatible with Mac. The old COM based approach (on which VSTO .NET add-in are built on) are legacy.
There is no way to reuse .NET code with this new technology, except of course to port business logic to the web server (which serves the web based add-in).
More reading on the comparison with the two add-ins generation: see this article I wrote
I second Benoit's answer. In addition, Not sure how complex is your add-in in terms of interactions with the document content, or if its a service that then inserts or imports data from a backend. Depending on that you will have more reusable code.
I would recommend you to do a full analysis on what APIs you need for your add-in to work properly. The new model offers big value with both supporting multiplatform and an easier deployment model. It also provides many rich APIs you can use, however the API depth its still not as rich as VSTO. Our goal is to get there.
I would be curious to understand if there are any gaps on you migration analysis.
thx!
Can anyone point me to an example of an Outlook Contact custom sync provider for the Microsoft Sync Framework? I would like to use that Framework to build a bidirectional sync between my CRM and Outlook. I've found a reference to this SO question: Sync Microsoft Outlook with my own data
Unfortunately, the link to MSDN example is no longer valid. It simply redirects to the MSDN sample gallery which has no such sample.
Any help would be much appreciated.
I am very curious to what the link was to, as well. I have not found anything short of either a "Wrapped PST Store" or "Custom MAPI Store" or "Custom MAPI Transport Provider". MAPI itself provides a synchronization process, but it is not designed to be used from managed code and is very complicated.
The best "roundup" I have found is the Outlook MAPI Samples on codeplex. These do not deal with any pretty "Sync Framework" though; presumably that is used as the back-end? (Most samples neglect how to get to the back-end processing.)
We are evaluating an entirely managed in-Addin synchronization process here to avoid having to deal with the complications of MAPI, but the viability is still not entirely known. (This approach also introduces different problems and limitations.)
Good luck and happy coding.
I am looking at doing some serious MS Outlook extensibility, going beyond the concept of e-mail, but still in the realm of messaging.
As such, I will need to be able to make Outlook aware of a new 'Account Type' (i.e., it currently only understands POP, Exchange, etc).
Can anyone point me to an area of the API that may facilitate this functionality, if it exists...?
Thanks
Adam,
reading your question about having a new provider you would have to look at creating a new Mapi provider. This is a pretty complicated area a place to start would be MSDN
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc979221.aspx also look for the pdf book "Inside mapi" on the internet
There may be other ways to look at the problem though using Addins for outlook that would extend the UI using panes and form regions etc. or and older technique is to use subclassing and hooking.
Marcus
I heard Microsoft allows use of commercially available Office UI controls, with the exception of competing products, such as a word processor or spreadsheet app, etc.
How true is that?
Also, if it is not true, do you know of any free Ribbon controls?
You should look at Jensen Harris' blog entry about licensing the Office user interface which explains it in great detail. However I believe the relevant point here is:
There's only one limitation: if you
are building a program which directly
competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft
applications with the new UI), you
can't obtain the royalty-free license.
You can still build a word processor with a ribbon. You just can't use Microsoft's ribbon. There have been ribbon-like interfaces around for a lot longer than Office 2007 (the one that sticks in my mind most is the pallet in C++ Builder: very similar to a ribbon), so they definitely don't own the concept, if that's even possible. I've seen a number of third-party or even open source ribbon controls.