Hi zorglups,

No worries; and nothing to be nervous about ... you're amongst friends!

While I may not be able to give you as much help with your question as I'd like, I can tell you that I'm investigating a very similar problem at work, in which it is necessary to call a Perl script from Outlook.  The intent is to be able to send a remote message to my Outlook mailbox, have a a macro parse the subject, and (if the subject contains the right keywords) have it call the Perl script, which would then take control of sending messages across a socket to a build machine, at which point it would initiate a software build.

I've been able to get all the way to the point where the VB macro does the right thing on the right kind of message, but getting it to call the Perl script has been problematic.  In the searches I've done on the Internet, I came across PerlCom, which is a component provided with ActiveState's PDK (Perl Development Kit):

PerlCOM is an ActiveX Component that allows you to easily embed Perl Interpreters into client applications. You can add Perl subroutines to your applications, use Perl packages and classes, and exchange data freely between the host languages and Perl. Now you can embed Perl in any development environment that supports ActiveX components.

Is that, perhaps, the kind of thing you're looking for?  If so, check out ActiveState's site, and specifically this link to their PDK.

I'm sure your knowledge of Windows is much more extensive than mine, so this may or may not be useful to you.  But perhaps it will at least be a start in the right direction.  It may be that creating COM objects even allows you to completely bypass VB.

And welcome to Perlmonks!


s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/

In reply to Re: Outlook add-in using Perl code by liverpole
in thread Outlook add-in using Perl code by zorglups

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.