General Information

GimmeNote is an Outlook VSTO plugin written in C#. It enables users to add notes to mail and appointment items. GimmeNote is designed to work with your primary (default) mailbox, which must be an Exchange account. IMAP and POP3 accounts do not support categories. Creating notes should also work on secondary accounts (even IMAP and POP3) while flagging notes may not work on those mailbox types.

Installation

Make sure that you have a working internet connection before you run setup.exe. The setup bootstrapper will download required components from the internet if necessary.

GimmeNote can write essential log information to the application event log. However, it cannot create the log source due to missing administrative rights. The log source can be created manually by running following Powershell command from an elevated Powershell window:

New-EventLog -LogName "Application" -Source "GimmeNote"

Since version 2.2.0.1 it’s no longer necessary to manually add configuration settings before GimmeNote runs the first time, unless you want to change some default settings (i.e. Category names). Refer to Configuration and Settings below to see which options need to be set before first run.

Update

GimmeNote will check for upates on a bi-weekly basis. Once a new version is published to https://technet.blogs.ms/apps/gimmenote it will be downloaded and installed silently in the background.

Configuration and Settings

Configuration is done within the HKCU\Software\GimmeNote registry key. Some configuration settings are best to be set before the Add-In starts for the first time, respectively before the first note is created. Please note that setting changes require a restart of Outlook to take effect.

Following registry values can be configured.

Configuration Examples

Set OneDrive as default note path (recommended to support “roaming”)

Open the registry editor and navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\GimmeNote” (create the key if it doesn’t exist). Create an “Expandable String Value” named NotePath with the path to your local OneDrive directory as content. You can use variables like in the example below.

For most users the value C:\Users\%username%\OneDrive\Documents\GimmeNote should work.

Following examples can be copied to a .reg file and imported into the registry.

Use Word as the default editor:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GimmeNote]
"NoteApplication"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\root\\Office16\\WINWORD.EXE"
"NoteApplicationArguments"="%NoteFile%"
"CreateFile"=dword:00000001
"NoteExtension"=".docx"

Enable verbose logging (enabled by default since v2.2.2.0).

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GimmeNote]
"EnableLog"=dword:00000001

Use the 64 char SHA256 hash value as file name (subject is no longer visible in file names).

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GimmeNote]
"HideSubjectInFileName"=dword:00000001

Version History

Know Bugs and Issues

Slow Start

When starting Outlook after GimmeNote has been installed for the first time, Oulook may deactivate the Plug-In because of a slow start. Outlook is designed to disable all Add-Ins taking more than 500 ms to start. Following items aid and abet the slow start of GimmeNote:

• Outlook is coded in .NET. I some cases it could take more time to initialize the .NET Framework.
• At the moment of writing, GimmeNote is still compiled with the Debug profile, which can cause a slower application start.
• When the Add-In is started for the first time, it creates folders, files and registry keys.

To solve the issue, simply click View More Details in the screen below.

In the Disabled COM Add-Ins window click Always enable this add-in.

Note editor opens in the background

When opening a note while holding SHIFT (conversation notes) or CTRL (paste mail body) it appears that the editor is opened in the background (behind the Outlook main window). The experimental configuration item MainThreadSleepInterval can be used to set a timeout value before the window is brought to the foreground. Some times it helps when this value is increased to 750 – 1000. The values specify milliseconds.

Download the current vesion of GimmeNote