Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, the sixth version of Microsoft’s premier
email and collaboration application, has arrived at a fork in the road. On one
side are the professional developers who use Visual Studio .NET to produce
add-ins that integrate tightly with Outlook. On the other side are the smart
end-users and rushed administrators who want to bend Outlook to their will
and work (or play) more productively. As the Office 2007 beta was getting
under way, K. D. Hallman, Microsoft’s General Manager for Visual Studio
Tools for Office, estimated that there were 3–4 million professional Office
developers and 16 million non-professional Office developers.