Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

OWA or Outlook on the Web have never quite had the feature parity with the desktop version of Outlook which can be a point of frustration for those primarily using it. Although interesting in Office365 new features like clutter, sweep etc are now lighting up in the OWA first before they make their way into new desktop releases. One of the things you haven't been able to do previously with OWA is create an Email with voting buttons. With compose apps and some of the recent changes in version 1.3 of the API which I posted about here , you now have the ability to add some of this functionality back in. Actually with a little imagination you also have the ability to actually build something a lot better then the voting buttons feature which have been around in Exchange for some time. But in this post I want to show how you can create a Compose Mail App that uses EWS to make changes to the draft message to enable the feature. One thing also to note i...

With the latest updates that have been released recently for Compose apps that are now available in OWA in Office365 and the Office/Exchange 16 preview the ability to extend what your compose apps can do has been greatly enhanced. With version 1.3 of the API you can now save an Item via the saveAsync method https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/mt269096.aspx  . Why this small change is important from an extensibility point of view is that when you save an Item this way, it creates a draft in the Mailbox you activated the compose app from which you can then modify anyway you like using the EWS updateItem operation. (normally you would be restricted in a compose app to just using the subset of properties and methods provided for in the Office.js). One trick however is the ItemId which you need to make an UpdateItem EWS Request to update the Draft Item is still only available in Read Mode. So to get around this I've come up with t...

Emojis and emoticons have been around for quite a while but are picking up a bit of steam of late with the release of Windows 10. The Daily mail had a really good article on their use recently which is worth a read. Like everything these new emoji's have there origins  story and text based emoticons (which have many other names) are kind of a interesting sub branch with a slightly retro feel. In this post I'm going to show you how you can create a Mail App to make using text emoticon's easy in Exchange 2013 and Office365 using the new compose apps feature which was introduced last year at MEC. Compose apps are one way of easily extending the User interface in OWA and Outlook 2013 (and 2016). So for this example I can do something like the following to make these text emoticons easy to insert into either the Subject or Body of a message (you need to active the app by selecting the Addin Button in OWA or Apps for Office in Outlook) At this point it should ...