Build Your First Automation Using Outlook SDK of SAP Build Process Automation

The Outlook SDK in SAP Build Process Automation, is a collection of activities allowing you to create automations using Microsoft Outlook. It comes with a rich set of functionality. For example:

• Search an email
• Read an email
• Download attachments from an email to your local folder
• Reply to an email
• Administrative operations like move or copy email from one outlook folder to another and many more

1. To create an automation project from SAP Build lobby, choose Create.

   

2. Select Build an Automated Process.

   

3. You can get started with a Business Process and include automation within that.

   For this tutorial, please select Task Automation option.

   

4. In the Create a Task Automation project window, name the project: Outlook Sample.

5. Fill in the description as follows: A demo to create outlook SDK integration using SAP Build Process Automation.

   Feel free to name your project and give a description as per your convenience.

   

6. Subsequently it will ask you to select your desktop agent. You can pick your active, preferably latest desktop agent version.

   By the time you follow these scripts, newer Desktop agent versions may have been introduced. Install the latest version of desktop components and select the latest version of agent in this step.

   

7. A dialog box is displayed to create a new automation. You can give a name to your automation, for example searchInOutlook. You can follow your own naming convention and name for your automation.

   

   If you had taken the route of creating a new business process project, you can add a new automation by following the given menu options.

   

   A new tab will open and display an empty automation for you to get started.

8. It adds mandatory core dependencies as part of automation addition to your project.

   

9. Once an empty project is created, you need to include Outlook SDK dependency to this project. Locate the settings wheel icon in your project.

   

10. From the dependency section, locate Outlook SDK and include it as a dependency to your project. At the time of this tutorial creation, Outlook SDK Version 1.32.41 was used.

    Always update Outlook SDK to the latest version.

    

    At this point, you are ready to work with Outlook SDK.

1. From the Tools panel on the right side, search for the activity Open Outlook Instance.

2. Drag and drop it into your automation flow.

   

3. Your task will be to do a simple folder search. Locate Search Email activity and add it to the flow.

   

4. Select the newly added activity and Create Custom Data as search criteria under Parameters section.

   

5. Provide a folder name and a storeName as per the input form. Here storeName refers to the email inbox, where you wanted the SDK to search.

   • folderName : it is an optional input. You need to provide one if you wanted automation to search a specific outlook folder
   • storeName : You may have additional mailbox configured within your outlook application. This field could be handy to search specific folder in your inbox. If you wanted to search the default inbox, you can leave the storeName empty.

   Name	Value	Example
   folderName	Outlook sub folder name	Invoices/ToCreate
   storeName	Email id	mymail@bestrunsap.com

   

   Review the option SearchCriterionList. You can include additional search criteria like emails with specific subject or from specific sender. You can refer to the documentation for additional information

6. Add Get Emails Number (Context) activity to the flow. The previous step creates a context which is what you are going to use in the next steps.

   

7. As this is your first automation using Outlook SDK, you can do a simple check to find out if there is a result in the search. For example, you can find out how many emails are present in that outlook folder. For this, add a Log Message activity.

   

8. If you wanted, you can include a custom message using the expression editor.

   

9. Add a custom message to log the total emails in your search results.

   

10. Add Close Outlook Instance and Release Outlook Instance to your flow. This is always required with an Open Outlook Instance call to release resources used by you.

    

11. Save the project, test run the project, you should see your expected result.

    

    Review the resources:

    • Microsoft Outlook Best Practices from the SAP Build Process Automation documentation

    • Outlook Email Best Practices Automation from the SAP Build Process Automation Store