Need Recomendation on Best Approach to a Outlook Add-in

[Kenneth Baltrinic]

I am a .Net developer who generally uses C# and .Net 2.0 for to do web
applications.

I have just been handed a little "side task" to develop a Outlook 2003/2007
compatible plug-in that will basically put a button on the outlook toolbar
and on the toolbar of any open messages that when clicked will grab the
subject, date received, body text and any attachments of the message and
upload them to an external correspondence control system. This is basically
for government user who receive e-mails whose repsonses require formal
handling via this external control system.

The "upload" process can either invoke a COM object already installed on
there system and hand the data off to it, or it could invoke a web service
on the server and upload the data that way.

Unfotunately I have done zero MS Office development. Back in the days
before .Net I did a lot of VB6 and COM and dabbled in VBA. But all that has
been a very long time ago.

We are looking for a quick and dirty solution. I have been given 40 hours
to get this done in so I have very little time to research and spin up. Can
a few people please recommend the approach that they would take to this kind
of a problem? I am looking at the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007
Office System as a possibility simply because its .Net but this might be
overkill.

 

[AD]

Hello,

Please clarify what the external correspondence control system is.

Thanks
Ariel

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

VSTO will help you get it written faster, an application written with VSTO
2005 SE or VS 2008 for Outlook 2003 will also work on Outlook 2007.

But ... VSTO 2005 applications can be difficult to deploy. (VS 2008 is
easier, but only for Outlook 2007.)

And ... if you want to take full advantage of the ribbon interface on new
messages in Outlook 2007, you'll have to jump through quite a few hoops. If
you want to use .NET, it might be actually be quicker to release (not
necessarily to maintain) if you develop the core functionality in its own
assembly that can be used in separate VS2008 versions for Outlook 2003 and
2007.

You might want to post any follow-ups to this post in the
microsoft.public.outlook.program_addins newsgroup, which is more focused on
your task than this one and has had a lot of discussions on multi-version
add-ins, etc.