Forum Discussion
Graham Keellings
Mar 04, 2018Brass Contributor
How to develop my first outlook puglin?
I have a few decades professional experince in embedded systems, plus good self-taught AngaulrJs, PHP & MySQL
Now, I would like to code an Outlook plugin-in (which will communicate with my won server-side code), and have no idea where to start. Googling gives lots of information, some of it conflicting, and it is difficult to tell what is up to date.
I want my plug-in to be compatible with as many current business users as possible. Am I supposed to code in C#, or JavaScript? How do I go about developing, debugging & testing it? Do I need to add it to the app store during development? Must I distribute it through eh app store, or can users get it direct from me?
I find a lot by Googling, but can't judge which is the good stuff, so would prefer an answer from someone experienced, rather than following a random search result.
Can anyone recommend a good book, tutorial or website? I am currently only interested in Outllok, and that is likely ro remain so, so need to consider other Office components.
Thanks in advance for your help, and please accept my apologies for asking such a basic question, but I would rather have a definitive answer, and start of fin the correct direction.
I suggest you to start here:
- paulpaschaBronze Contributor
I suggest you to start here:
- Graham KeellingsBrass ContributorThat looks excellent. Thank you very much!
With that alone, I can get started, and be confident that I am on the right track, as you are an MVP. Google had lost connced me that I needed a VSTO, so this has saved me going wrong.
As, I said, with that alone, I can start, and ask more quesiotns later, if needed. But, if you have time ...
My add-in should do the following, will that be possible? Allow composinng an email through a form, which builds it togther from the address book/contacts and standard form input, like edit boxes, cobo boxes, etc. It should then invoke an AJAX function to get some data from the server and use that in the email body, and finally send tailored emails to each recipient who was chosen from the contactss or added manually.
Is that acheivable, do you know? Thanks again :-)- paulpaschaBronze Contributor
I think you can by implementing so called add-in commands:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-ins/add-in-commands-for-outlook
As described in the article your add-in command can appear when composing an e-mail message. From there you could open a Task Pane rendering your Form and call the services you need.