Skip to main content

OWA Voting Buttons Compose App for Office365/Exchange 2016

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 is that creating an Email with Voting buttons isn't supported also in EWS  so I'm using a workaround of generating the PidLidVerbStream property value using the documentation from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee218541(v=exchg.80).aspx . The one issue you can have is if you don't get the value of this property correct this can cause Outlook to crash (which means you then need to delete the offending item with mfcMapi). So this Mail App would be unsupported, experimental and largely untested.

Here's a screenshot of what the Apps looks like in Action


After you select the Voting option you want you need to hit the Save button which will invoke the actions to modify the draft message.

I've put the code for this MailApp up on my GitHub repo https://github.com/gscales/MailApps/tree/master/OWAVoting  if you decide to test it and find any bugs please submit them back. As I mentioned before you should consider this experimental only. All the code is included in the script.js file and uses the workaround I described here as this was only a test app I haven't put any error processing in the Aysnc callbacks.

Labels

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Exporting and Uploading Mailbox Items using Exchange Web Services using the new ExportItems and UploadItems operations in Exchange 2010 SP1

Two new EWS Operations ExportItems and UploadItems where introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 that allowed you to do a number of useful things that where previously not possible using Exchange Web Services. Any object that Exchange stores is basically a collection of properties for example a message object is a collection of Message properties, Recipient properties and Attachment properties with a few meta properties that describe the underlying storage thrown in. Normally when using EWS you can access these properties in a number of a ways eg one example is using the strongly type objects such as emailmessage that presents the underlying properties in an intuitive way that's easy to use. Another way is using Extended Properties to access the underlying properties directly. However previously in EWS there was no method to access every property of a message hence there is no way to export or import an item and maintain full fidelity of every property on that item (you could export the...
Read more

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Gr...
Read more

Sending a Message in Exchange Online via REST from an Arduino MKR1000

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You ...
Read more
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.