Using Extensions in Calendar Events - exchange-server

Im building a time report app using Microsoft Graph to read/write to the users Outlook Calendars and another connector to read/write to an ERP System. So I need some meta data in the calendar events like customer number, project number etc.
I'd rather put that in to the events using open extensions but there are some issues with that, could need a nudge in the right direction
The problems with open extensions:
When copying a calendar event from another client than a PC, e.g a Mac the Open Extensions does not get copied to the new event.
Is the best approach here to just put that as text in the body of the event instead, with the risk of that the users can freely change and destroy.
Or is there a way to have non-PC outlook clients copy the extension data?
Ideas or suggestions much appreciated. Thanks.

Related

Replicate the share email to microsoft teams function

I am currently investigating a way to share emails from our desktop application. Written in c# using .Net framework 4.7
We would like to use the same dialog that gets initiated when you use the "Share to Teams" button in outlook passing in the .eml file. The user would be responsible for selecting which people or channels to share to.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
We can succesfully build a simple url share using their launcher concepts, but this is pretty limited to the browser and doesn't support files
https://teams.microsoft.com/share?href=www.stackoverflow.com&msgText=Testing
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/concepts/build-and-test/share-to-teams
And there is nothing mentioned in their deep-links section on msdn to achieve this
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/concepts/build-and-test/deep-links
If you're building your own desktop app experience anyway, why not use Graph for this? For instance, see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http . You'd need to do your own Search box, but you can do that on Graph also - here for instance is a channel listing endpoint (this example is for within a specific Team): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/channel-list?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http

Custom form in Outlook Task is not syncing

My partner and I created a custom task form to be used in Outlook using the developer mode to do that, and we published it to the Organization Forms Library for anyone to open. We're running into issues that I personally can't seem to find on how to resolve:
Custom forms aren't syncing correctly.
When I complete out the custom form, and I assign it to someone else they might be missing details like the dates I picked from the date picker, and text within the text box are gone too. It's very odd that sometimes some would get all the details that an end-user would input but that's like a 1/8 chance. I feel like there's a disconnect where it just won't behave like any other task. Cache mode or no cache mode doesn't matter it seems. When the person assigns it back with changes made on their end, those changes aren't seen on my side. I just have the same original details that I made when I first made it. We're on Exchange Server 2010.
Looks like a custom form was not published correctly to others in the organization. Try to create a new Outlook item on other machines with your custom forms to make sure they were deployed correctly.
Note, message forms default to separate layouts for composing and reading. Many people find their first message form doesn't look right when they receive an item created with it. That's simply because they forgot to click the Edit Read Page button and customize the Read layout!
You may find the Customizing Outlook Message Forms article helpful.

Visial Studio - MS Teams - Auto Email Changes to Spreadsheet - Is this possible?

Visual Studio 2017
Microsoft Teams
Scenario:
Within Teams we have a team with a tab that contains a spreadsheet. Users can enter information w/ a new number and the name of the person responsible etc.
Is it possible that when this item is entered that an email can automatically be sent to the person responsible from within Teams?
I have done some initial research and so far I do see where you can create apps BUT I just would like to know if what I am proposing is possible and if so would it be a monumental undertaking or shouldn't be too difficult.
Any thoughts/feedback appreciated,
Thank you
There are actually two problems to solve here. One, how to detect that something happened in Excel. Two, to take action on that event and send email.
For both of these, you can create Excel macros using VBA (transforming the file from xlsx to xslm). XSLM files require the full Excel client though and don't run well on the web version of Excel. I can't think of another way to do it using Excel.

How to share user roaming settings between Outlook COM/VSTO and Office JS Add-in

Is it possible to share user’s roaming settings and preferences between COM/VSTO Outlook and Office JS Add-ins?
Scope
The following article covers an approach for developers to make a bridge between COM/VSTO Outlook Add-in and Office JS Add-ins to share user’s roaming settings and preferences.
Introduction
There are plenty of companies who deliver reach experience to their customers through COM/VSTO Outlook Add-ins for ages and Outlook 2000 to the latest version support is normal for them. With maturity of the Microsoft Office Store and technology behind Office JS Add-ins more and more companies looking to implement their existing solutions using Office JS API. Ability to write once and distribute easily the application for environments where Office works is very attractive point. But what about customers who still use old reliable Office 2010 or even older. You may say: “Let them use our old COM Add-in and don’t look back”. Well this may be valid point until this customer start to use Outlook for Web and realize you’ve created the Add-in for this environment as well. Great! Start using it … but wait a second, where are my settings and preference I set at my work place when used desktop solution for Outlook? What if I would like to change my preferences? Now I have to do that twice? A developer would say: “Move on to our new solution, forget about old COM”. But users probably have a reason why they use old Outlook version with COM Add-in at work and OWA with new Office JS Add-in remotely (during a trip, work from home, etc.). The reader probably got my point by now. As the developer, you may want to make life of those customers simpler by sharing the preferences between your brand new and shiny Office JS Add-in as well as your old, but solid and full of features COM/VSTO solution. So, let’s find out how to do that.
Office JS Add-in Roaming Settings
Right from the requirement set 1.0 Office JS API RoamingSettings object was introduced with four methods to manipulate with user settings. You are able to set, get and delete any custom value of the user setting/property type of {String|Number|Boolean|Object|Array}. This object keeps those settings per user mailbox and will be available to your Office JS Add-in from any location, device, etc. True roaming to keep your user’s preferences and settings, isn’t it? Please note: You should not use this object to keep sensitive information such as user credential or security tokens. The following example demonstrate usage of the object:
// Get the current value of the 'myKey' setting
var value = Office.context.roamingSettings.get('myKey');
// Update the value of the 'myKey' setting
Office.context.roamingSettings.set('myKey', 'Hello World!');
// Persist the change
Office.context.roamingSettings.saveAsync();
COM/VSTO Add-in for Desktop Outlook
Let’s return to our COM/VSTO solution. There is the single pre-request: to handle the settings which were stored in the user’s mailbox developer needs to know Office JS Add-in ID as the RoamingSettings are stored per add-in and per user. Well, you would know it indeed, as this is your/your company Add-in. The settings we are looking for are stored in the message property, which is stored in Associated contents table of the Inbox folder may be accessed using IMAPIFolder interface. Wow, this was the key sentence from entire post and needs to be explained in details.
First you would need to enumerate all messages in associated contents table and find the message with the class “IPM.Configuration.ClientExtension.00000000000000000000000000000000”, where zeros must be ID of your Office JS Add-in.
When message selected, you would need to get “PR_ROAMING_DICTIONARY” Property.
This property will contain serialized data we stored as roaming setting when used Office JS Add-in in our example above:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<UserConfiguration>
<Info version="Exchange.12" />
<Data>
<e k="18-ExtensionSettings" v="18-{"myKey":"\"Hello World!\""}" />
</Data>
</UserConfiguration>
Your COM/VSTO Add-in will be able to read and modify those settings with simple parse. You may want to expose your COM Add-in user setting as well. Usually those settings developers keep in HKCU Windows Registry, to roaming world per user mailbox. The benefit of this not only in capability between Office JS Add-in, but separated set of settings of your Add-in per user mailbox. When those settings created from Desktop Outlook use different info version, for example:
<Info version="Outlook.16"/>
Conclusion
As the final note on the topic I would like to illustrate the simple example of shared settings of an application from the same provider where COM and Office JS Add-ins share user settings.
References
https://dev.outlook.com/reference/add-ins/RoamingSettings.html
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc842083.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc842374.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc842386.aspx

programmatical GForge upload and download

INTRODUCTION
I am part of a project team which uses an old GForge system (community edition v5.6.1) to host our source code and provide some further services. One builtin service is the upload and download feature. Thus users can easily get the generated application version. In order to provide this downloadable version, we as developers have to use a browser (e.g. IE or FF) to navigate into the appropriate GForge page, then tick some buttons, fill some text boxes and finally hit an "upload" button which opens a file dialog to specify any file to be uploaded into the GForge download area. For a download, the procedure is similar. Additionally, from time to time there comes a separate WEB page to request a session login.
Now, as we as developers are in a "hot phase" and need to provide downloadable versions with high frequency, the procedure described above is much too error-prone concerning essential parts of the release, and too slow. Besides that, there is always a real person necessary in front of the screen to click around.
QUESTION
How can we manage to programmatically upload and download generated software versions into and out of GForge's download area while overcoming the password page on the first hand (of course using a valid user account)?
WHAT WE'VE TRIED SO FAR
Using a Python script. Python provides very helpful modules like "urllib", "urllib2" and "requests", with which any HTTP access (even the ones with session password protection) should be managable. After many hours of trying, the GForge system only returns the password request page. Not any of the interesting files. Even far away from uploading anything.
Using an AutoIt script. AutoIt can automate mouse movements and keyboard presses as well as direct access of visible elements on the screen. It provides a "Window Info" application to identify any window element. But e.g. buttons and text fields within WEB pages (HTML) are not recognized. So we don't know how to correctly identify GForge's password text field in order to move the mouse there, and type in the necessary text. And from there go on imitating the person sitting in front of the screen.
Does anybody have some experience regarding the solution of our problem?
I'd upgrade your system to v6.4.2 (current GForge version). From there you will have access to the SOAP interface which will make all this possible. When GForgeNEXT is released, https://next.gforge.com, the SOAP interface will be replace by a REST-ful API making this integration even easier.
The upgrade to v6.4.2 from 5.6.x will be a bit painful but our team would be happy to help, just create an account on gforge.com and then open a free support ticket here:
https://gforge.com/gf/project/gforge5/tracker/?action=TrackerItemBrowse&tracker_id=10345
Disclaimer: My company manages GForge so the advice given above I'd give to any paying client. For further clarity, files in GForge are stored in the file system. The SOAP interface allows you to reach into the database for any ticket or document grab the appropriate document and even replace it. Programatically, it is the cleanest answer.

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