We have been developing addins for Microsoft Outlook for over 10 years now. We always expect it to get easier but it never really does. The truth is, that in our case we still have some customers rock-in the old Microsoft Outlook 2000. To us, this seems plain crazy, but you know what they say about customers… The customer is always right.
In our search for solutions to speeding up our development, we found a solution that also happened to drastically expand our possibilities. Add-in Express, offers multiple suites of tools for multiple languages. Do you need to develop an Office addin using .NET? They have you covered. What about Delphi? Yep, that language is covered too. What about Outlook Express of all things? Yes, they even have a solution here. A little insiders tip, Outlook Express isn’t open to developers so there isn’t an easy way to add functionality to this application. Well, unless you are using Add-in Express’s solution.
For us specifically, we loved the interface enhancements for Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft is always pushing forward with new enhancements to their product. But, when you start looking at 4 different versions of a product, you have to make some tough decisions about what to implement because newer functionality is not backwards compatible. Add-in express has tools that allow you to add forms and controls to any Outlook view all that way back to Outlook 2000! Awesome. Even Outlook 2003 doesn’t let us modify the views with this amount of control.
If you are looking at Microsoft Outlook as a possible platform then we strongly suggest you take a look at Add-in Express’s suites of tools. Your products will go to market quicker and have a greater feature set.
