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Understanding the Hosted Email Add-In Framework

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Applies To: Windows Server 2012 Essentials

A custom email add-in package has two major components: an adapter that allows the operating system to call into your email service, and any modifications to the UI you have chosen to make. To support these components, the hosted email framework consists of three layers: data operations (which contains your adapter), the UI (which contains your changes to the user experience), and the business logic (which links the adapter to the UI.)

Data Operations

The data operations layer is where your code directly provides access to your hosted email service. Therefore, your custom add-in must provide two components:

  1. An adapter that directly communicates with the hosted email service. The adapter must also implement the management operations that are defined by the IHostedEmailAdaptor adapter interface. For more information, see Creating the Add-In.

  2. An add-in configuration file that contains required information for the add-in and hosted email service. This includes the URL locations for your service, help contact phone numbers, and what built-in UI’s have been modified or disabled. For more information, see How to: Create a Configuration XML File.

Business Logic

The business logic layer is the middle layer that links your adapter code to the user experience. The business logic layer links your code to the UI by exposing two interfaces: a built-in hosted email provider, and the Hosted Email Integration (HEI) Manager.

  1. The provider exposes the HostedEmailManager interface, which the UI calls into, and passes those calls to your adapter. For more information, see How to: Manage the Hosted Email Service.

  2. As the name implies, the HEI Manager is responsible for managing your custom add-in, and is defined by the HostedEmailIntegrationManager interface. This management process consists of two tasks:

    1. Saving the configuration settings for your custom add-in. The HEI manager does this by reading the initial configuration settings from the custom add-in configuration file. This information is often presented to the user in the Users section, or else in a top-level custom tab you create.

    2. Loading and unloading the custom add-in assembly.

User Interface

The UI layer contains a set of built-in UIs. These UI’s provide a generic end-user experience for an integrated email solution, and are similar to the extensibility already provided by the Windows Server Essentials SDK. The UIs include the following:

  1. Configuration and unConfiguration Wizards

  2. Integrated user management on the user tab

  3. Built-in alerts

Using the existing and new extensions to the UI, you can implement a customized and deeply-integrated experience on the Windows Server Essentials dashboard. If the new extensions do not meet all of your needs, you can develop and implement your own UI. For more information, see Modifying the UI. For an example creating a dashboard UI extension that integrates with the new hosted email UI, see Quickstart: Creating a Hosted Email Adapter.