Office 365 Outlook Add-in Development Using NAPA (Basics) - Part 1

Nowadays customers are really demanding single window operations or a unified view while they are on their tasks. In this article I am exactly addressing how Office 365 Outlook users can work in unified way.

To achieve this, I will use Office 365 platform, Outlook and NAPA for developing Outlook Add-in. This will be a 3 part series and we will begin with basics and then will go towards complex scenarios.

Prerequisites

• Office 365 Subscription
• Office 365 Outlook Mail Configured
• SharePoint Online Developer Site
• Napa - Office 365 Development Tool

Creating a simple Outlook Add-In

Considering you have all the above prerequisites, let's follow below steps to create a very basic add-in for outlook.

Step 1: Launch Napa from SharePoint Online Developer Site and click on 'Add New Project' link.



Step 2: From the screen select an option 'Mail Add-In for Outlook' and provide project name as BasicOutlookAddIn and hit Create button,



Step 3: After clicking create button Napa explorer will be launched and will show all the required files needed for AddIn as below,



Step 4: From the explorer, just select Run project,



Step 5: This will upload and deploy our Addin for Office 365 Outlook and pop up will ask to launch the app as below,



Step 6: Once Outlook is launched, select any of your email item and observe add in BasicOutlookAddIn shown as below,



Step 7: Click on name of the addin link and ensure you are seeing Subject and From of the selected email item,



This way, addin can access our email objects and can display them as a part of AddIn.

In the next article, we will actually implement some of the functionalities in this outlook addin.

Read more articles on SharePoint:

• Create A Provider Hosted SharePoint Add-In With SQL Database in Azure
• Creating SharePoint Add-in Using ‘Napa’