Hi all,
If you haven’t heard Microsoft is moving all its clients to “New” Outlook by default starting in January 2025. By 2026 unless you specifically opt out everyone will be using new Outlook. This is basically a very thin client that interfaces to the web Outlook version. The client therefore no longer has any access to the file system and most importantly for people like me who specialise in Office automation there is no way to use COM to control Outlook. I have a client for whom I have written a few things mainly to do with receiving emails, detaching the attachments and processing them accordingly. Things like treating PDF and other attachments differently is important to my client but at this stage there will be no easy way to get around this and having their IT department accept it. This is annoying obviously but I wonder how many of the automation solutions out there actually rely on COM under the covers and how this is all going to pan out.
Would it be feasible to have a ‘Processing’ directory for saved attachments that you monitor and then operate on??
Or will saving be impossible altogether?
This is very bad news. Our product relies on COM for Outlook and is very complex. Having looked at the new Outlook, as far as I can see to get access to local data would require a web service on each client. Not a great idea.
I have spent some time researching this issue and I found an article where the authors claim that you will still be able to download the full desktop “Classic” Outlook and install it from the Windows store. It will continue to receive security updates to 2029 and is fully supported. I have suggested this as an option to my client to see if they are willing to go with this suggestion given it is only a small subset of their users who need the COM automation. The alternatives are to prevent the automatic upgrade using policies and of course a full re-write of the code to avoid any reliance on Outlook at all. I wonder if MS intends to get rid of COM altogether. I can’t see them removing VBA automation from Excel but stranger things have happened.