I want to know if there are ways to customise the outlook (2013) mail exchange client. Ultimately, I want to, if possible, have an extra field when viewing the mail, e.g. after received time, a field called 'category'.. user selects from dropdown, sales or other. Ultimate I'd want to be able to add the value to the extended property of the mailitem object. I have experience using Exchange Web Services and coding in C# and Java but have no idea if the above is possible (custoomising the outlook interface, not just menu customisation) and if so what languages/tool are best used.
Any suggestions apopreciated.
Sure, you can do that. But you can use built-in Outlook categories (which you can extend by adding your own ones).
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i want to display a message to the user (as an infobar for example) as soon as the user opens the mail. In the 'supported events' list i could not find an appropiate eventlistener that fires when a mail is opened. Does this event even exist? If yes, what is the name? If no, how else could i possibly achieve this task? It is a priority that i display an infobar and not set a category or any workaround like that.
Thanks in advance
I tried finding an appropiate eventlistener but could not find it.
Outlook activates some types of add-ins if the message or appointment that the user is reading or composing satisfies the activation rules of the add-in. The user can then choose the add-in from the Outlook UI to start it for the current item.
To have Outlook activate an add-in for specific conditions, specify activation rules in the add-in manifest by using the Rule elements. Read more about possible rules and workflows in the Activation rules for contextual Outlook add-ins article.
Note, you can post or vote for an existing feature request on Tech Community where they are considered when the Office dev team goes through the planning process.
I'm creating an add-in that detects fraud in emails with in the body using AI. So I need run every time the user open an email. I didn't find anything on events. The Context add-in seems to not be usable in this scenario because of the dependency on regular expressions. I wanna know if someone knows another approach to this use case.
Currently the feature of event based activation of add-ins in read mode, is not a part of the product. We track Outlook add-in feature requests on our Tech Community Page. Please submit your request there and choose the appropriate label(s). Feature requests on Tech Community are considered, when we go through our planning process. For more details on event based activation of add-ins you can read here.
There is no way to activate add-ins automatically for a selection without contextual conditions triggered (regex and etc.).
I am trying to build a new add-in command (button) to add to the Home tab in the Outlook ribbon. This is easy enough to do, but my organization also wants to target the button based on properties in one's Active Directory profile (specifically department). Is this possible? Thank you so much!
This is pretty straightforward with desktop office add-ins (like VSTO). All you need to do is basically to get information about the currently logged in user organizational unit from the active directory, and then show/hide/modify buttons depending on this information.
From the tags on your question, it looks like this is NOT what you are looking for (please correct me if I am wrong)? The fact that you added "office365", probably means that you are interested in javascript (cloud/browser/store) solution?
For javascript-based add-ins, the part where you get the user department from its profile was impossible until recently. Now you may check out the Single-Sign-On API (added last year). It provides you information from user's Azure active directory profile, meaning that your organization is supposed to be part of it.
Another difficulty could be, dynamic display of the related buttons (showing/hiding/enabling/disabling) (I may be wrong, but it looks like it is still not supported for javascript). You can try to create a workaround for that by building a custom task pane instead (you can do whatever you want on your task pane)
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In case of .NET VSTO add-in, you can get user groups using:
UserPrincipal.Current.GetAuthorizationGroups()
Then you can control which buttons/controls to show/hide by providing callback function(s) in your code and in your ribbon interface definition file (you need to define Ribbon using XML, not with UI designer). There are callbacks available like getVisible, getLabel, etc.
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.
When composing an outlook message, I would like to provide non-invasive feedback to the user regarding whether the email is being sent to email addresses on approved domains.
For example, if the user is sending an email where the 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' text fields contains an email address which does not end in '#AnEmailAddress.com' then a warning of some kind should be displayed appropriately.
The warning could be a single icon which shows red or green, or perhaps each name/email address can be formatted on the 'To:' et al text fields directly, in order to provide the feedback.
I've done some digging with no specific results. I'm not sure if this can be done with VBA or the scripting within Outlook forms. Or perhaps an add-in needs to be written via .net?
Any pointers greatly appreciated.
This is a good candidate for .NET add-in. Not sure if you can do that from VBA.
Depending on the range of Outlook versions you need to support, you may want to go for VSTO add-in (separate builds for different versions) or NetOffice (one build for nearly all versions). Both have pros and cons so you need to be more specific to make a choice.
If you already compose your outlook messages with for example C# than use it also to implement some kind of alerts you want..
You question is - VBA, scripting or .NET?
My answer: it depends on your skills and preferences