Is it possible to develop a chat plugin like Gtalk for outlook?

Question

My company uses outlook as the email client and we login to an exchange server. Out address book (not individual contacts) has all the users connected to our company network.

Our company dont have IM ;-( .. I am thinking about developing an outlook plugin like Gmail's Gtalk . is this possible(technically)? Or how difficult it is? Will I be able to get the list of all users (from address book) who have opened their outlook so that I can show them in the online list? Can I do this without a DB (just sent the message to the recepient and show them)?

Outlook development is new for me and the links in this question did not help me much (very confusing). Where can I get some basic tutorials to begin with?

Edit: I have worked with VBA in outlook. So if the above can achieved using VBA the it would be great ;-) Is that possible?

Answer 1

VBA is an old method of building Office plug-ins and has since been replaced with just a more straight forward VB/C# module coding method. VBA plugins from Office 2003 should work alright in Office 2007, but it's no longer the suggested method if you're looking at Office 2007 + 1.

If you're using Visual Studio 2005, look for information on the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) Second Edition add-on on MSDN. If you're on Visual Studio 2008, the VSTO packages should come with the Professional editions (or higher) by default. It'll have all the templates for building add-ons for the Office suite. Going with this new direction of coding add-ons, anything should be possible.

I've personally never tried to make any sort of server/client solution, so I'm not helpful on that front, but I thought I'd put that information out there for you to consider in your planning stage of making the chat solution.

As a note, the non-individual (Exchange) address book is also known as the Global Address List (GAL).

Answer 2

Outlook 2010 includes instant messaging:

Use instant messaging services with Outlook

Microsoft Outlook can be used with several instant messaging services. You can tell if your contacts are available for a real-time online chat, audio and video conferencing, or file sharing.

Note Online status is available for any person whose instant messaging e-mail address that you have added to your instant messaging contact list. In addition, online status is shown for people using Microsoft Office Communicator, regardless of whether they are on your instant messaging contact list.