Outlook programming of a process support tool

VBA development of an Outlook plug-in to support daily work processes

eWorks has developed an Outlook plug-in for its own use to support daily work processes around Microsoft Outlook 2010: the "eWorksOutlookTools".

The "eWorksOutlookTools" help Outlook users to create and sort emails, save file attachments, open project folders and many other micro-tasks that have to be performed countless times a day. In order to automatically sort incoming emails, the Outlook add-in has been connected to the central project database via an interface: the manual and time-consuming creation of Outlook folders and Outlook rules is now a thing of the past. Links to important websites and intranet applications have been integrated to round off the functionality. Outlook activities that used to take up valuable time are now carried out at the click of a mouse or fully automatically in the background - the resulting increase in convenience and simultaneous time saving is enormous.

The Outlook add-in not only saves working time, but also avoids user errors resulting from ignorance or carelessness: conventions regarding e-mail subject or file storage are firmly programmed in and are no longer "just" a convention - but an automatism. This means that many process errors can be prevented before they even occur and, as a nice side effect, the training effort for new colleagues is also reduced.

In the course of the VBA programming, it turned out to be a particular technical challenge to intervene in central Microsoft Outlook processes, such as sending or receiving e-mails, without impairing the stability of Outlook. This is because, unlike other Office applications such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, Outlook is used almost continuously and must under no circumstances be slowed down or even crashed by custom programming. This requirement was met by particularly careful VBA programming and meticulous error handling - Outlook stability was not impaired and user acceptance was quickly gained.

eWorks programmed the Outlook tool with Microsoft Outlook 2010 and VBA tailored to its own needs. For easy distribution to all workstations, a deployment mechanism was developed that installs the complete VBA solution in just a few seconds. Since then, the eWorks team has benefited from the Outlook tools countless times a day, avoiding unpleasant process errors and saving valuable working time.