There are a lot of third-party add-ins and connectors available for Outlook. What’s the difference between add-ins and connectors, how do you use them, and are they safe to use? We’ve got the answers for you.
What are Add-ins and Connectors?
Add-ins and connectors are ways of connecting Outlook to 3rd-party applications. These applications include ones most people have heard of (even if you haven’t used them) like Dropbox, Trello, and Slack. There are additional add-ins and connectors that you’ll probably never hear of outside of corporate environments. These usually facilitate activities like expenses, CRM (customer relationship management), and video meetings.
The aim of all of them is the same, though: to allow you to interact in some way with another application from right within Outlook.
The difference between an add-in and a connector is about the direction of the integration. An add-in allows Outlook to send something to another application. A connector enables the other application to send something to Outlook.
For example, there is a Trello add-in and a Trello connector. The Trello add-in allows you to create or amend a Trello task straight from an email. The Trello connector will enable Trello to send notifications and reminders direct to Outlook.
There are two primary types of add-in: ones that use buttons and ones that highlight parts of the email.
The add-ins that use buttons put a button onto the ribbon that you can click when viewing an email. Clicking this button will activate the add-in functionality, such as sending the email to Trello to create a task, or posting the email contents into a Slack channel. At this point, the relevant content from the email is sent to the 3rd-party service.
When an add-in that highlights content is installed, it tells Outlook what kind of information it uses, such as location data for a map add-in. When you open an email, Outlook looks for that kind of information—an address, for example—and highlights it. When you click on the highlighted content, the relevant information (the address, in this case) is sent to the 3rd-party service so they can display it on a map for you.
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