Laserfiche Office Integration 11 is not compatible with New Outlook for Windows

replied on March 12, 2024

Hi Pierre,

There cannot be a "fix" to make the existing Laserfiche Office Integration compatible with the new "Outlook for Windows", as it completely removed support for COM add-ins. The Laserfiche Office Integration is a COM add-in. There's nothing we can do to make our COM add-in work with something that doesn't support COM add-ins.

We had to write an entirely new Outlook add-in that's not based on COM. As the "Solution" section of the KB you linked says:

Laserfiche does offer a new dedicated Laserfiche for Outlook add-in that can be installed from the Microsoft Add-ins Office Store and is compatible with newer versions of Microsoft Outlook 2019 and 365 as well as the new Outlook for Windows. The Laserfiche for Outlook add-in currently supports Laserfiche Cloud, but support for self-hosted Laserfiche may be added in the future. If Laserfiche Integration in Outlook is critical for your business, we recommend that users do not upgrade to the new Outlook for Windows at this time. Laserfiche Cloud users that have the Laserfiche Office Integration, also known as Office plug-in, installed should plan on migrating to the Laserfiche for Outlook add-in. Information on how to obtain and install the Laserfiche for Outlook add-in can be found here:

https://doc.laserfiche.com/laserfiche.documentation/en-us/Default.htm#365-add-in.htm

No firm dates on that coming to self-hosted yet. Using it with self-hosted has dependencies that are not yet in place.

Do you have self-hosted customers who are actually planning on switching to New Outlook at an organizational level any time soon? The general impression of its feature set as of a few months ago was borderline beta software. Microsoft is supporting Classic Outlook "until at least 2029".

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replied on March 14, 2024

We are in the process of moving to new Outlook for our users and are using self-hosted. We will need this in the near future.

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replied on March 20, 2024

Hi Samuel,

Thank you for the clarification and added information, we had several customers that the user had toggled to the new outlook and had mentioned that they lost the Laserfiche ribbon in Outlook, luckily the users where able to revert back to the previous Outlook to continue to have access to the LF plugin. Hopefully the solution for self-hosted will be available in the near future.

Thank you

Pierre

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replied on January 7

The new Laserfiche add-in still appears to only work with Cloud. More and more of our customers moving to the new Outlook due to organizational requirements but are unhappy to loose the Outlook to Laserfiche functionality that they have relied on for year. What is the timeframe for when this add-on will work for on-prem with:

Laserfiche Windows Client
WebClient via web services

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replied on January 7 • Show version history

Update March 21, 2025

The API Server 12 release has been postponed until later this year. We are tentatively targeting the Fall 2025 release for both API Server 12 and the updated Office Integration with support for New Outlook.

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The main dependency for bringing the new Laserfiche Outlook Add-in to self-hosted is Repository API v2 support, which is coming with the Spring 2025 API Server 12 release.

The new Office Add-in is the team's next priority after that, and I understand we'd be aiming to get it out in the following release window this year. We're very aware that Microsoft is pushing New Outlook increasingly aggressively and that more and more of our customers are adopting it.

Getting the initial Laserfiche 12 release out the door in Nov '24 was an extended all-hands effort from our development team, and we're now able to return our focus and effort to other important self-hosted initiatives like API Server 12 and the new Outlook Add-in.

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replied on January 28

Thanks for that update, Samuel! I look forwards to both the new outlook add-in and the new office add in.

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replied on February 25

Hey Samuel, on the topic of the Office integration update for LF12, do you happen to know which applications will be able to integrate with LF12 as part of the update? I was poking around Microsoft's add-in sites after looking in Answers to see if anyone had inquired about OneNote integration (Brian responded at one point and noted that OneNote didn't have add-in ribbon functionality at the time), and noticed that the list of applications that are compatible with the new non-COM version of Add-In integration now includes OneNote/Visio/Project.

(I'm operating under the assumption that the update was created through one of the methods mentioned on this page: Office Add-Ins Platform, so if I'm wrong, I apologize!)

Do you know if there's planned support for those applications (ex OneNote etc) included in the new Office integration roll-out later this year? Will the updated integration mean that users' Office Online experience is more in line with what O365's online application experience is like (more functionality)?

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replied on February 25 • Show version history

Hi Hannah,

Our main focus for the new Add-in is New Outlook, since Microsoft is pushing organizations to actively transition to it from classic Outlook.

Do you have specific use cases in mind for OneNote, Visio, and Project? Laserfiche can store but can't natively work with any of those application' file formats.

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replied on February 27

Hey Sam,

In our organization a lot of teams use OneNote to coordinate various processes requiring note-taking and brainstorming. I don't have a ton of visibility into the extent of the usage, but of the teams I have worked with so far on our ECM project, there are some folks who are VERY heavy users of OneNote, and when I noticed that they're now supporting add-ons, I was very interested.

I was mainly just curious because due to how OneNote saves files (each "tab" is a separate file), I could see the workaround of "download-then-upload" being a bit of a pain for those teams. Being able to have a LF plug-in even just to decrease the quantity of times that people have to exit the program and then initiate a manual download would be nice. The more integration we have, the easier it is to promote wholesale usage of LF for content management - otherwise there are a lot of "use LF for X, BUT in this use case Y, use XYZ software instead".

Being unable to access LF as a network location makes things a lot more difficult for folks just because of how a lot of Office's cross-program integrations with other Office programs require navigation through a network to work well. (I can only think of mail merges* at the moment, but I know there are other examples).

There are a few things I personally would love to see improve with Office integrations, but I don't necessarily have a ton of insight into back-end requirements and what Microsoft has made accessible to non-Microsoft developers (ex O365 Office Online is way more advanced than what people can use in LF Office Online integrations now, even down to where it's tracking changes and how it (Office) attributes changes in version reconciliation during scenarios where multiple users are in a file at once, but I don't know if that's because it's Sharepoint that's allowing for that tracking or because it's a newer version of Office Online).

I can provide more tailored feedback regarding Office integrations and use cases for the requested functionality but it might be more helpful if I send it through an email and attach the file to a separate post here (because then I can put screenshots etc). Again, I don't have a perfect understanding of what kinds of functionality are available through integrations, but I have lots of ideas for things that would be helpful for folks.

Thanks for that information RE the priorities, I appreciate it!

Hannah

*As an aside, I know that the usual workaround is to use a WF for mail merges or download the referenced files, but our organization has some sophisticated instances of mail merge usage that make downloading the source files each time difficult and the prospect of using WFs for them still feels a bit unwieldy, especially when there are new mail merges being created fairly frequently by our staff.

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Laserfiche Office Integration 11 is not compatible with New Outlook for Windows

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