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My company has a plan to develop an add-in for Outlook that can interact with our web-based internal ERP application or our database to retrieve and update data.

I have done some studies on this topic and found that there're 2 approaches available:

  1. Using Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) that can leverage .NET language such as C# to develop an add-in that can be installed to local computer like an assembly.
  2. Develop a web-based application using Napa or Visual Studio: this kind of add-in can run on both Outlook desktop and web application as well as can be published to Office store.

But I am still confused of the pros and cons of each approach and have not decided yet. Does anybody have experience on this and give me some advice? Thanks in advance.

PhucVD
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    I think it comes down to how much of the Outlook Object Model you need to access. If your software needs to leverage a wide selection of internal Outlook functions, VSTO is the only way to go. Web Add-ins have less access to internal Outlook functionality, but are ideal for applications accessing selective Outlook functionality and other functionality and data outside of Outlook. – joeschwa Nov 13 '15 at 16:15
  • I see and will consider it, thank you! :-) – PhucVD Nov 15 '15 at 15:46
  • VSTO is working desktop version of Outlook and web-based application using Nepa or visual studio has limited function and work for limited version of outlook. web-based application it xml based addin . If you need any help let me contact. I have already developed more than 100 of outlook plugins – Shyam sundar shah May 14 '17 at 07:03
  • hei shyam i want to to develop one webbased outlook add-in .Have u any example `? – meer Jun 13 '17 at 12:49
  • @Shyamsundarshah Will the add-in developed using VSTO work on outlook web as well? – Pramod Patil Mar 11 '19 at 10:31

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It depends on your goals - what exactly you need to implement in Outlook. I'd suggest starting from the Selecting an API or technology for developing solutions for Outlook article. Mail Apps API is still very limited.

Eugene Astafiev
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