Microsoft Outlook Project Search Tool

For my internship at Kai Hawaii, I developed an add-in for the company’s Microsoft Outlook inboxes. The engineers recieve and send many emails regarding different engineering projects, and store many files related to specific projects on the network folders. The add-in that I developed makes it easy for the engineers to search for project folders on the network drive and in their inboxes, and helps them organize their emails related to specific projects into shared project email folders to keept their inboxes clean and organized. The add-in includes a search tool to search for folders by project names or numbers, a move tool for filing emails into project folders, a navigation tool for quickly accessing specific network drive project folders, and a favorites list for easy access to frequently used folders.

For this project, I was responsible for finding an efficient way to search through the thousands of project folders, such that the add-in would not be disabled by Outlook for taking too long. My solution involved storing the users’ file data on a text file on their computer, and accessing that file instead of searching through every Outlook folder, which takes lots of time. I created a simple searching algorithm to search through the contents of the data file. The end result was a very quick and simple searching tool that the engineers find very useful.