We have a process at our company that processes TIFF images. I have a project where I want to be able to capture emails that people have received and let them pass it on to our imaging process. Right now forwarding an email isn’t really an option but our initial thought was that we could create an Outlook addin that would create and send an image of the email to our internal webservice and it would just work.
I’m developing on Windows 7 with VS2010 and Outlook 2007.
I have the basic addin framework setup – that seems to work OK. The addin is there, popping a regular Windows form where I can do my stuff. But now I’m running into problems. First I was going leverage the built-in Microsoft Office Document Image Writer which can write to TIFFs. However, this doesn’t appear to be installed as part of Office 2007 on Windows 7. Then I found some references that it didn’t work on Win7 64bit in the first place, and that Microsoft was phasing it out in favor of their XPS printer anyway.
Then I moved on to thinking I could maybe use PDFCreator. This sort of works, except it looks like I have to actually have PDFCreator installed on the client machine, too. I was really hoping I could just bundle the dll and PDFCreator could natively “print”, but it seems rely on you setting the active printer to “PDFCreator” and still printing to that. I was already maybe going to run into problems pushing a custom addin out to users in the first place; I don’t know if I could get a new printer rolled out as a requirement, too.
On top of that, you apparently can’t set the active/default printer in Outlook once it’s running. So my plan to run the addin, change the default printer to PDFCreator, print it, then change it back isn’t going to work after all anyway.
We really wanted to be able to capture emails as if the user had printed them out and scanned them, which is what they have to do now. I would really not like to rely on copying/pasting into another application if I can help with it.
Sooooooo, what other options might I have? Is there any close to native functionality in Windows or Office that would let me print to something and eventually get a TIFF? Does it look like I’m going to have to try and string together a bunch of 3rd party tools or something? It looks like the only way to “print” an email is to do the MailItem.PrintOut() command, which is just going to go to whatever the current default printer is. Are there any other TIFF-printing things available that wouldn’t involve installing a new virtual printer on the end user’s machine? Any other ideas? Thanks for any help!
Although you ruled it out at the start of the question…
Assuming you need those tiffs at a central location and not at the employee desktop…. I’d still advise you to have your addin forward the respective mail to a central location (as an attachment to a automated mail, or perhaps just write it to a queue folder on some network location), then have a central process pick it up and print it out to tiff files.
Unless you have exact control over the client machines at your company (which from the sound of it, you don’t), you really want to move some fickle as ‘switching printers in Outlook’ away from the clients.
That doesn’t mean this approach doesn’t require hacks as well, because that central process will be running outlook to do the work.
I assume it is important that your tiffs look like they were actually printed from Outlook, if not please add that as extra information to your question, as it opens new routes. Like capturing the email-screen rendering and putting that inside a tiff file, which can all be done on any desktop machine.