Outlook Plugin Overview

Overview of Tier1 for Outlook(TFO) architecture.

• The TFO add-in resides in the Outlook process/environment as a VSTO extension and communicates with Outlook for associated data using the Microsoft COM Interop for Outlook.

• Session authentication with Salesforce is typically established using OAuth protocols that support single sign-on (SSO) or standard login flows.

• All TFO-specific information exchanges with Salesforce, for example contact lookups, searches, logging, are performed through REST calls over HTTPS to the TFO managed package interfaces.

• The TFO managed package has internal objects for managing logged Exchange items, emails and meetings, and relationships to generated call report and Salesforce event instances.

• Mass email generation is performed directly against the Exchange server, using EWS or SMTP or Omnigage, instead of using the Outlook COM interfaces to avoid locking up Outlook during mass email sending.

The following diagram illustrates the architectural model of the add-in and the related systems.