This morning, while talking with a prospect, they told me that a competing vendor told them they would add a feature that would let them import emails into their software in a fairly unique way. My response? Of COURSE we can do that too!
What I didn't tell them was that I didn't know jack or squat about Outlook add-ins.
Enter Add-Iin Express (http://www.add-in-express.com/). Less than four hours later, I had a fully integrated add-in which did exactly what the client wanted. Sure, it could use some spit shine, but man were they impressed when I showed it to them this afternoon. It may even get us the contract.
Did I mention that I didn't require any support or assistance, and did everything based on the manual and demos from the website? No? Well, that's a pretty big deal for me. :-)
So, if you need to integrate with Outlook, or with MS Office in general, check out this product. It's amazing. Kudos to Eugene and the crew at Afalina. They've done a great job.
> This morning, while talking with a prospect, they told me that a competing > vendor told them they would add a feature that would let them import > emails into their software in a fairly unique way. My response? Of COURSE > we can do that too!
> What I didn't tell them was that I didn't know jack or squat about Outlook > add-ins.
> Enter Add-Iin Express (http://www.add-in-express.com/). Less than four > hours later, I had a fully integrated add-in which did exactly what the > client wanted. Sure, it could use some spit shine, but man were they > impressed when I showed it to them this afternoon. It may even get us the > contract.
> Did I mention that I didn't require any support or assistance, and did > everything based on the manual and demos from the website? No? Well, > that's a pretty big deal for me. :-)
> So, if you need to integrate with Outlook, or with MS Office in general, > check out this product. It's amazing. Kudos to Eugene and the crew at > Afalina. They've done a great job.
> So, if you need to integrate with Outlook, or with MS Office in > general, check out this product. It's amazing. Kudos to Eugene and the > crew at Afalina. They've done a great job.
I Agree.
I have been using Add-In Express for one year and it is fantastic.
I spent some time loking at their videos of online demos and still don't understand what practical applications could be built with them. Anyone care to comment?
Ed Dressel wrote: > I spent some time loking at their videos of online demos and still don't > understand what practical applications could be built with them. Anyone care > to comment?
I did a couple of Office Add-ins using VB - which eases things quite a bit - but still they were DARN complicated to do.
AddInExpress, instead, claims(didn't try it for myself) such process to become much easier. I haven't tried them, but if they only ease the process by - say - 30% that's surely worth the value.
The most complex part of creating such add-ins for Office is the fact that there're *awful* COM complexities to deal with. Just adding a toolbar can be a real PITA, because you have to take care of so many things, avoiding to mess with the "Normal.dot" template and such beasts. Plus, while the previous run it seemed to work, the next for some reason might not work the same way :-( . It's one of the worst programming tasks possible.
>I spent some time loking at their videos of online demos and still don't >understand what practical applications could be built with them. Anyone >care to comment?
I just bought them this weekend and they are REALLY cool! We're working on a solutions that would allow the user to push things like emails and contacts from their Outlook into their MBS Navision ERP system. While ADX is only a small part of the project, it will definitly save us a lot of time using them..
>I spent some time loking at their videos of online demos and still don't >understand what practical applications could be built with them. Anyone >care to comment?
>I spent some time loking at their videos of online demos and still don't >understand what practical applications could be built with them. Anyone >care to comment?
Hello! You wrote on Sat, 2 Apr 2005 09:43:45 -0800:
ED> I spent some time loking at their videos of online demos and still ED> don't understand what practical applications could be built with them. ED> Anyone care to comment?
With most things, unless you have a problem to solve, you don't understand what the solution is applied to. I.e. unless you have to make an Outlook add-in, you will unlikely find Add-In Express useful.
> With most things, unless you have a problem to solve, you don't understand > what the solution is applied to. I.e. unless you have to make an Outlook > add-in, you will unlikely find Add-In Express useful.
I seriously may have uses for it but everything is abstract (the demos they have are as useful as a Hello World app) and no where can I find a list of what people are doing with it.
You need to set the background of your pages to white BTW. If people don't have default white in their browser, then it looks funny. Nice feature though.
Hello! You wrote on Mon, 4 Apr 2005 16:15:22 -0700:
ED> I seriously may have uses for it but everything is abstract (the demos ED> they have are as useful as a Hello World app) and no where can I find a ED> list of what people are doing with it.
We have an add-in for Excel and we had serious troubles dealing with various versions of Excel. There was no Add-In Express when we made our module. And what Add-In Express offers is first of all a way to reduce the number of problems. I.e. even if it doesn't make coding easier, it definitely makes debugging less painful.
> I seriously may have uses for it but everything is abstract (the demos > they have are as useful as a Hello World app) and no where can I find a > list of what people are doing with it.
Here is a page that lists some sample applications that are using aie:
> so are you able to import Outlook emails into your application? and if so, > next time you do an import, are you able to check against duplicates?
In my application, all I want to do is be able to import an email as a "task" and hook it to a particular client. I'm merely creating a task with the type of "Outlook Email", with the subject and text of the email placed into it.
In the case of duplicates (which is really the responsibility of the Add In or the database engine), I don't care - worst case is that someone merely deletes the task from my software. If this were not the case, I could put dupe checking in fairly easily.
> so are you able to import Outlook emails into your application? and if so, > next time you do an import, are you able to check against duplicates?
One other thing: it isn't the importing that I needed AIE for, it was accessing the contents of emails and integrating my UI into Outlook. The actual importing of the email was the code I needed to write myself:
Easy peasy. :-) It was getting at the message subject and text that was the harder part, though the sample add in for outlook that they supply on their site gave me most of the code required.
> In my application, all I want to do is be able to import an email as a > "task" and hook it to a particular client. I'm merely creating a task with > the type of "Outlook Email", with the subject and text of the email placed > into it.
I've been working on my own email client to plug into my application--what you describe seems much easier. 4 hours---I got more then then in just class structure and no UI.
