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Outlook as a Platform

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Buzz Bruggeman has started an interesting discussion about Outlook as a platform. Since starting at Microsoft, I've spent a lot of my time supporting (and trying to support) developers coding on top of Outlook, both within MS and outside of it. However, Buzz's comments reminded me that despite that I haven't done much of my own coding on top of Outlook. I would like to do more, partly to understand the current pain that obviously exists for developers coding for Outlook, but also because there are lots of little features I would personally love to have, that just aren't a priority for enough users to get built into the product.

I also see how valuable a thriving Outlook developer community can be to our bottom line. It's the developer community that has made other platforms (notably Windows and Palm) so successful. I would certainly agree with Buzz's comment that "My gut tells me that Microsoft never intended Outlook to be a near industrial strength personal CRM system." But why not make it possible for others to build that on top of Outlook? (Obligatory plug for BCM, which is working to do just that.) Or anything else for that matter?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2005
    Please chime in the comments. I am writing an article for the Technolawyer. It will be published in June and will go out to about 15k lawyer/geeks. I think there is a lot to talk about. I keep wrestling with this idea that says software should be a bit like the Burger King metaphor, i.e. we are happy to sell it to you, but at the end of the day, having it your way is what the user wants.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2005
    For years I've wanted to build on top of Outlook for both personal (little features I want, just as you said) and professional (custom or ISV) projects, but every time I've tried to approach it I've gotten turned off by Outlook's overall developer unfriendliness, including:

    A) lack of a clean, comprehensive, and stable (let alone managed) object model and API

    B) lack of good documentation

    C) lack of a real development and debugging environment

    Heck, I can't even figure out how to customize the forms to make the e-mail field longer! I'm sure I could figure it out, but when something that simple is non-intuitive and non-discoverable, one isn't motivated to dive deeper. I've been meaning to look into VSTO, but I'm not sure if that even includes Outlook.

    Until this is mitigated through .NET (maybe a System.Office.Outlook namespace in Whidbey?), solid VS/VSTO support, good MSDN docs, and/or Office 2006, much of Outlook's potential as a platform will go untapped.

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2005
    Good points, Beta. I can only agree that Outlook's current development experience is not all that great. You may want to look into http://www.add-in-express.com/, a great tool that provides a .NET interface to Outlook's object model. I've done some debugging and development of Outlook addins using Visual Studio and didn't seem to have any problems, though I was developing in C++, and not .NET.

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2005
    Thanks for the awesome feedback Amit! I've forwarded it on to the program manager for the object model so it gets looked at by the right eyes. I think that the suggestion to provide symbols is probably the best one, and I'm going to see what is possible in that regard.

  • Anonymous
    March 29, 2005
    Hi. I am not sure that this is the right place to ask a developer question about outlook, but I have gone completly desperate, so here it is:

    I am trying to program outlook (on .Net). I want to add an appointment to the calender - and then to check if it is in conflict with any other appointment. There is the 'Conflicts' property of the appointment item - but it just doesn't work - and simply returns an empty collection any time it is used. I am trying the most simple scenario but still - nothing. Any idea anyone ? plleaase ?

    If any one reading this thinks he can help please contact me: jivan@softhome.net.
    Thank you guys.

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2005
    The Conflicts property on MAPI Items is a collection of sync conflicts, not appointment conflicts. To find appointment conflicts you could restrict the Items collection on default calendar folder by time and determine if another appointment confilicted with the one they are attempting to set programmatically. Or you could show the appointment in the UI and the UI would warn about an existing appt on the Infobar.

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2005
    Re the problem mentioned above:

    "For example: Adding a new command bar to a Word Inspector window fails. When an Outlook addin or Exchange Client Extension tries to add a command bar to the CommandBars collection of a Word Inspector window (this happens when Word is used to display rich text emails) this call fails with E_FAIL. In fact addition of a command bar into Word from any out-of-process code fails"

    I'd really like a solution to this problem for Outlook 2003. Any suggestions?

    Thanks.

    PJDM

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2006
    We just got this error. Using Business contact manager, and .Net Framework 2.0
    Help!

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2006
    So obviously, I should point you to customer support for problems like this, specifically for BCM. I happen to know some of the BCM team and asked them what's up and here's what they said:

    "The real issue here is that he had BCM V1 installed and when he went to Office Update, nothing prompted him to install BCM V2 and when he installed Whidbey CLR, BCM V1 started crashing every time and nothing suggested him that he should just upgrade BCM to V2."

    So it looks like you just need to upgrade to BCM V2. If that doesn't solve the problem, customer support is the way to go.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2006
    Here  - http://www.outlookcode.com/d/outtech.htm  - more documentation and tutorials for Outlook development.

    Hope, it'll be helpful.

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2007
    Buzz Bruggeman has started an interesting discussion about Outlook as a platform. Since starting at Microsoft, I've spent a lot of my time supporting (and trying to support) developers coding on top of Outlook, both within MS and outside of it. However, Buzz's comments reminded me that despite that I haven't done much of my own coding on top of Outlook. I would like to do more, partly to understand the current pain that obviously exists for developers coding for Outlook, but also because there are lots of little features I would personally love to have, that just aren't a priority for enough users to get built into the product. I do not agree. Go to http://apartments.waw.pl/

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2007
    Do you have any documentation for this IExchAttachedFileEvents interface?

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