{"id":17378,"date":"2024-01-05T08:30:06","date_gmt":"2024-01-05T16:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/?p=17378"},"modified":"2024-01-29T06:25:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-29T14:25:26","slug":"retirement-of-entity-based-contextual-outlook-add-ins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/retirement-of-entity-based-contextual-outlook-add-ins\/","title":{"rendered":"Retirement of entity-based contextual Outlook add-ins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, we\u2019re announcing that entity-based contextual add-ins in Outlook will be retired in Q2 of 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Contextual Outlook add-ins were introduced in <a href=\"https:\/\/learn.microsoft.com\/javascript\/api\/requirement-sets\/outlook\/requirement-set-1.1\/outlook-requirement-set-1.1?view=common-js-preview\">Mailbox requirement set 1.1<\/a> to identify entities in messages and appointments, such as an address or a phone number. The add-ins would then initiate tasks based on these entities without leaving the mail item. Over time, the adoption of contextual add-ins decreased, while the cost to maintain it remained substantial. After careful consideration, we believe that we could provide you with a more valuable experience by focusing our resources on other areas. Because of this, we\u2019ve decided to retire entity-based contextual Outlook add-ins.<\/p>\n<p>Once retired, contextual add-ins will no longer be able to detect entities in mail items to perform tasks on them. Support for Microsoft add-ins that rely on this feature, such as the <a href=\"https:\/\/support.microsoft.com\/office\/3383547a-400d-4fed-a040-aad25fb2ac71\">Bing Maps, <\/a>Action Items add-ins, and Suggested Meetings will be discontinued.<\/p>\n<p>We know this change may cause some inconvenience and disruption to you. To help minimize potential disruptions, the following will still be supported after entity-based contextual add-ins are retired.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We\u2019re developing an alternative implementation of the <strong>Join Meeting <\/strong>button in meetings, which is activated by online meeting add-ins. Once support for entity-based contextual add-ins end, your online meeting add-in will automatically transition to the alternative implementation to activate the <strong>Join Meeting<\/strong> button.<\/li>\n<li>Although contextual add-ins will no longer be able to activate on detected entities after support ends, we will continue to support your add-ins activating on regular expression rules. To learn how to configure your add-in with regular expression rules as an alternative solution, see <a href=\"https:\/\/learn.microsoft.com\/office\/dev\/add-ins\/outlook\/use-regular-expressions-to-show-an-outlook-add-in\">Use regular expression activation rules to show an add-in<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we make this change. If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/OfficeDev\/office-js\/issues\/new\/choose\">raise an issue on GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For the latest news and updates, follow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/microsoft365dev\">@Microsoft365Dev on X (Twitter)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, we\u2019re announcing that entity-based contextual add-ins in Outlook will be deprecated in Q2 of 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140971,"featured_media":17674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,12,298],"class_list":["post-17378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-365-developer","tag-office-add-ins","tag-outlook","tag-outlook-add-ins"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Today, we\u2019re announcing that entity-based contextual add-ins in Outlook will be deprecated in Q2 of 2024.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140971"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/microsoft365dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}