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Assistify Outlook Plugin

Adds a button to Outlook to send the current e-mail to an Assistify or Rocket.Chat channel.

The first time you use this plugin, you will be asked to provide the URL of the chat you want to use. After that, you are expected to log in there. This is required to connect your personal chat account to your Outlook instance. This connection persists, so this is not necessary the next time you use the plugin.

When you send a message to the chat, you are asked to select a chat channel / room. In this room, the plugin creates a new discussion, so that you and your team can discuss the e-mail in this new discussion.

Developing the plugin

If you want to change something on your local version of the plugin, you can setup a local server, which serves the modified pages of the plugin to outlook.

  1. Create a server certificate by executing the following command:

    openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout server.key -out server.crt

  2. Install a tool to serve local files via https:

    npm install -g local-web-server

  3. Modify your local copy of the manifest.xml file by replacing the string https://assistify.github.io/outlook-plugin with https://localhost:8000.

    Dont commit these changes!

  4. Import the modified manifest.xml file to Outlook

  5. Start the local server

    ws --https --cert server.crt --key server.key

Debugging

The plugin can be debugged in the developer tools of Chrome. If you have a local server running, you could even add a line with the debugger command in the JavaScript code to stop at this location, because it is sometimes difficult to identify the file between the several hundred (!) files that Outlook loads.

Customer Documentation

Install Outlook plugin

To install the Outlook Plugin go to the browser version of outlook and deactivate the new outlook theme:

Old Outlook Theme

Next click on Manage add-ins:

Manage Outlook

Find upload from url from the My add-ins section and insert the manifest.xml url https://assistify.github.io/outlook-plugin/manifest.xml:

Upload From Url

After you installed the Plugin a new icon should appear in your Outlook for Windows / Mac / Desktop

How to use the Plugin

Click on Discuss in Assistify and enter the Server-URL:

Enter Server Url

Click on Next and enter a valid username and password for Assistify. Currently only local login-data is supported. Login via SSO is not possible at the moment.

Click on Connect and choose a Topic to post your email.