Microsoft Outlook channel

See the Channel Catalog to see which Plans have access to this channel.

Microsoft Outlook is an online personal information manager. Pipelines currently integrates with the Email and Calendar features only.

Please note that terms used in the Microsoft Outlook channel categories are Microsoft Outlook specific terminology.

How to Connect

1. On the My pipelines page, select Create Pipeline.
2. Search for or select a step, and then select it to add it to the pipeline.
   When you add a step to a pipeline, it is added to the canvas of the pipeline designer.
3.  Expand the Connection section of the step, and add the required information.

For more information about connections, see How to connect to a channel.

Connect to Microsoft Outlook

1. Expand Microsoft Outlook in the list of channels and click Connect to Microsoft Outlook.
2. In the pop-up window review the permissions that Pipelines will be requesting. Click Connect to Microsoft Outlook when you are done.
   
3. Microsoft may require you to sign in at this point. Enter your credentials to continue.
4. Microsoft will show the permissions being requested. Expand each for more information. Click Accept when done.
   

How to reconnect

You may need to reconnect your account to a channel. Reasons may be (but not limited to):

• If you need to connect a different account.
• Authorization updates, such as a changed password.
• Editing the access rights that Pipelines has to the channel.

To reconnect:

1. Select a pipeline that already has this channel in it.
2. Open a step that contains this channel.
3. Under account, select Connect (or reconnect) and follow the process above, How to connect.
   

Note: You can switch the account used in your pipeline by reconnecting. You don't have to create a new pipeline. Sometimes, if you are already logged into your MS account even when clicking reconnect, you may find that you can't enter the credentials for another account. Instead, MS will connect you to the account where you are already logged in. In this case, try using a browser incognito or private window to reconnect.

Using a shared mailbox account

Pipelines can work with Outlook's Shared Mailbox function in all of the following Outlook channel steps:

• Send an Email
• Send an Email with Attachments
• Search Email
• Reply to an Email
• Look Up an Email
• New Email
• Search Attachments

There are now two ways to use a shared mailbox's functionality, they require different permission levels and have slightly different behavior, as described below.

Pipelines can distinguish between acting on behalf of a shared mailbox account and using a personal account to send emails from a shared mailbox:

Shared Mailbox case

In this case, you fully impersonate a shared mailbox account. All actions are performed on behalf of the shared mailbox - send, receive, reply, search. You are not exposed to the receiving party.

• Sent items are kept in the sent folder of the shared mailbox.
• You'll need full access rights to the mailbox to use Shared mailbox functionality.
• The shared mailbox field is visible in the options of each step where you can use a shared mailbox.

Personal user send from a shared mailbox case

You can still Send an Email, Send an Email with Attachment, Reply to an Email from a different (shared) mailbox using the From address field in the step. All actions are performed from the personal account that is connected to pipelines - send, receive, reply, search. You are still not exposed to the receiving party.

• Sent items will be kept in the sent folder of the personal account.
• Send as/Send on behalf permissions on the shared mailbox are needed, but not full access rights.
• Use the From address field in the step to use this approach.

Where the email is saved

The behavior described in the Where the email will be saved fields below is the default behavior. This default behavior can be changed by the following factors:

• If the message is sent from an address that does NOT have a mailbox (a distribution list, for example), there is NO Sent Items for the from user
• If the user has set the Save to Sent Items field to False in the Send an Email and Reply to an Email steps - this will prevent the item from being saved to the Sent Items folder.

Outlook Administrators can update the From user's mailbox to always save a copy of messages sent from a delegate to their Sent Items. This will prevent the item from being saved to the Sent Items folder.

Steps

The steps you can use with Microsoft Outlook fall into two categories: Calendar Events and Emails.

Limits

These are known limits with the Outlook channel:

• Attachments on Send an Email with Attachments/ Reply to an Email have size limit of 140 MB.
• Every single file has size limit of 100 MB

Issue Tracking

We need an application that keeps track of customer issue requests. Here are our requirements.

• Support staff can do the work to update the ticket and craft replies to end users directly in a Quickbase app without needing to jump into the group mailbox 

• End users can receive updates and reply via emails from the group mailbox without needing to go into the ticketing system 

• All correspondence between the support team and the end users is tracked in a single email correspondence and the messages in this conversation are logged against the ticket in the QB app.

First of all we need to create a new app(Customer Requests) in Quickbase. Then, we need a table Requests where we will save the information about each request. We can use the following fields:

Request Subject, Request Target Id, Priority, Status, Assigned To, Document records, Add Document, Customer Email, Work Order ID, Date Created, Date Modified, Last Modified By, Record Owner, Related Contact, Mail Body, Mail Thread IDMail Thread ID - the id of the request mail. Work Order ID - the id of the request.

Now, we create two pipelines. The first one will create a new record in the table when a new request is received and the will send an initial reply.

The first step of the pipeline should be New Email in Microsoft Outlook.

We might want to specify that the Subject does not start with “RE:” because otherwise we will fall into a loop of sending replies, creating records for them and sending another replies. In the second step we create a record in the Work Orders table.

In the final step we send an initial reply with the info of the work order in the table.

The second pipeline will send another reply on status change in the Work Order table.

The first step will trigger the pipeline on status change in a record of the table.

The second step will retrieve the initial email by id.

The final step will send the reply informing the sender about the change in the work order status.