Inspirometer Outlook Add-in Support

In some cases, your computer may ask you directly if you want to run the file, but sometimes it simply downloads it and lets it sit there. You may find the file at the bottom of your browser page, or you may need to go to your downloads folder to find it. In most browsers this can be done by depressing the Ctrl button and hitting ‘J’ (Ctrl + J).

It is not uncommon for a box asking you to approve something gets stuck behind a box which is showing you progress on something else (or some other window). If you are looking at a box which seems to be stuck, minimise your other programme windows, and move the boxes you can see around to see if there is another box hiding behind them. If there is, read what it says, and take the appropriate action to get things underway again.

Simply close down all of the windows on your machine. Then either shut the machine down and turn the computer off and on again, or select to restart it. Then give it a few minutes to settle down, and try running the installation again (click here for the link), paying special attention to everything that is happening so that you can see the point where it stops and explain what happened.

Hopefully, just doing this may cause everything to start working again. If it does not then you may need to get technical support – please see ‘Technical Support’ at the end of this document.

In Outlook 2010 and later these will look a bit like the image below.

Clicking the button will reveal a number of options. Clicking the ‘Open Meeting Stats’ option should take you either:

• Directly to your stats, if you are already logged into your account
• To the login page for your account.

If the button is not present anywhere on the opening (email) or calendar page of your Outlook, then the plugin has either not installed properly, or it has become disabled or deactivated.

To see if this is the case, click on the ‘File’ menu, and then on ‘Options’ (this will open up a new panel similar to the image below).

Clicking ‘Add-ins’ in the left hand menu (which may be toward the bottom of the list) will show you a list of current add-ins and their status within Outlook.

If the Inspirometer Meetings Tool is listed in either ‘Inactive Application Add-ins’ or ‘Disabled Application Add-ins’, then click the ‘Go …’ button at the bottom of the panel beside ‘Manage COM Add-ins’, and in the new panel that opens up tick the entry for ‘Inspirometer Meetings Tool’ (see below) and then click ‘OK’ and then click ‘OK’ on the Add-in window to close it.

If Outlook disables the add-in a second time, we recommend that you take a look at the section below on problems with Outlook.

If, however, the ‘Inspirometer Meetings Tool’ add-in is not visible in the list at all, then the installation has failed. This sometimes happens when machines get a bit overloaded. In this case, we would recommend that you restart your machine, log in and then let it settle down, and click the install link before opening any other applications (including Outlook).

If this still does not load the buttons, then you will probably need to get technical support – please see ‘Technical Support’ at the end of this document.

This is entirely normal security if you are not already logged into your account. If you already have your password, simply enter it and your email address into the respective fields, and then follow the on-screen instructions to access your data.

If you do not already have a password, or if you have forgotten it, the process is the same. Click on the ‘Forgot your Password?’ link at the bottom of the panel, and follow the instructions to get your new password. You can then use your new password along with your email to log into your account and follow the instructions above.

This may be for one of two reasons: Either you do not have any relevant meeting data for the last 30 days, or something has gone wrong in uploading it.

Take a look at your calendar for the last 30 days, and see if you actually have meetings where you and others were invited to a meeting event. Please note, the Add-in ignores all other appointments (except for travel time) and so only bona-fide meeting events will show in your data. If you are not sure whether an event is a meeting or an appointment, double click the event to open it, and then look in the middle of the header line on the window that opens. It will clearly say whether it is a meeting or an appointment at the end of the title, e.g. ‘Speak to Jonathan – Appointment’

If you have no meeting data in your calendar for the last 30 days, you can test whether your account is working correctly by creating a meeting for yesterday, and inviting yourself to it. Then click the button to ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ and then reopening/refreshing your meeting stats page.

If there is a problem in uploading your data, this may be because something has gone wrong with the ‘Welcome Email’ from Inspirometer. The ‘Welcome Email’ contains information which the add-in uses to configure itself, but if the email is missing or in the wrong place it cannot get the information it needs. Please check that your ‘Welcome Email’ is in your Inbox. If it is not, you might try looking in your junk folder, and move it back to your Inbox if you find it there.

If these things do not apply, then we would recommend that you follow these steps in order until it does work:

• Try connecting Outlook to your account via the sign-in button – see the image on the right, otherwise …
• Wait one hour, and then shut down Outlook and restart it, and this should initiate a new ‘Welcome Email’
• Check out Q4 below to make sure you are in the right place to see your data
• Follow the guidance in Q5
• Get technical support – please see ‘Technical Support’ at the end of this document.

Is it possible that you may have logged into one with one email address, and into the other with a different email address? Please check that you are logged into the right Inspirometer account for the default email address the Outlook where your meetings have been organised, and check that the green box in the top left hand corner of the screen shows the word ‘Personal’

Help-desks have a great success rate in simply getting their people to switch things off, and then switch them back on again.

However, by this point you will already have restarted your machine at least once (if you have not, now would be a good time to try it) and so the next step is to uninstall the add-in, and then reinstall it from scratch. You will find guidance on this below.

This practice sometimes extends to other events such as symposia etc.

The fact that there are invitations in the event, and that Outlook deems it as a meeting (as you will be able to see in the heading if you open it up) causes the add-in to treat it as a meeting. In this way, a vacation of two weeks has a massive and inaccurate effect on the estimated time spent in meetings.

The practice however is convenient, and fairly widespread, and there would be resistance to changing it. Fortunately there is a way round the problem. By either:

• Changing the subject to precede it by the word Holiday:
• Categorising it as Holiday

The add-in will ignore such events and exclude their data from the analysis.

If you have such data in your own calendar, please go back over the last year, and change the subject of such events, or re-categorise them accordingly. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ option via the Inspirometer button on your Home ribbon.

To keep your data accurate, please follow the practice of always preceding the subject with the word Holiday: This will ensure that the event is ignored in both your calendar, and also the calendar of whomever you invite to this event.

Not every organisation or individual is good at sending out meeting invites from their calendar. Accordingly, you may have put placeholders in your calendar to remind you of your attendance at such events, but because they lack invitations, both Outlook and Inspirometer assume that they are appointments.

To ensure that these register in your data, edit the event subject and precede it with the word Meeting:  This will enable Inspirometer to recognise it and add it to your stats along with all the meetings it identifies normally.

If you believe that your stats are missing some important data for this reason, please work back through your calendar, and edit the subject of those meeting events to precede them with ‘Meeting:’. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window to update your data with these changes.

 It is therefore vitally important that the only meetings in your calendar that are accepted are the meetings you actually attended. All other meetings should be deleted (or at least declined). Equally it is important that you actively accept (even retrospectively) any meetings you actually did attend that are currently marked as tentative or ‘not yet accepted’.

If you believe that your stats may be in error for this reason, please work back through your calendar, and accept or delete the relevant events until it reflects an accurate depiction of your time and attendance. Then click the Inspirometer ‘Refresh Meeting Stats’ button at the top of your Outlook window to update your data with these changes.

The reason for this is usually because the Add-in either encounters data that it was not expecting and does not know how to handle, or because it struggles to get the data at all. Sometimes this is due to damaged mail-boxes or corrupted meeting or attendee data, sometimes it is due to very slow internet or VPN connections, and sometimes it is due to unexpected security settings or unexpected conflicts with other Add-ins.

Over the years, many of these problems have been identified and resolved, or solutions put in place to mitigate the issue. However, technology, security, and third-party apps are changing all the time, and that brings new situations that we (and the add-in) have not encountered before.

When uploading your data to Inspirometer, our add-in has to make sense of all of the details concerning the meeting and its attendees. Slow networks, and complex organisational structures can make this incredibly time consuming. If your records are stored in a central exchange, and each individual request (tens of requests per meeting, times the number of meetings in your calendar) takes up to a second or more to collect the relevant record across your network, the upload can go very slow, and Outlook can become very sluggish (or stop).

This problem of record access across slow networks is well known, and can affect other aspects of Outlook and add-ins. Because of this, Microsoft has developed cached exchange mode and recommends its use with all exchange or Office 365 accounts. This gives you almost instant access to the data you need even where the network is impossible. For guidance on switching on cached exchange mode (which is a 1 minute job) the Microsoft advice page is very straightforward and helpful.

Over time, it is not unusual for data and systems to malfunction from time to time, perhaps as a result of an unexpected shut-down or a partially completed task. Often the system will correct itself, but in so doing it can leave a legacy of things that aren’t quite right, and these can build up. The same is true of our mail boxes.

Most of the time, we may not be aware of the problem, except for a little glitch from time to time. However, Inspirometer works through all your meetings, and if a problem exists it will encounter it. Hopefully the encounter will be with an anomaly that it is already programmed to deal with, but the issue with anomalies is that they are not predictable.

Fortunately there are programmes that can be installed that can look for these anomalies, and fix them for you. And in the case of a mailbox, it is even possible to delete it and have it built back up for you automatically. However, both of these things are fairly involved, and we recommend that you use local IT support to work through these with you.

You can see how to disable your Outlook Add-ins via this Microsoft page.

If the problem is resolved, you can re-enable your Add-ins one at a time (or in clumps) until the problem returns and you can therefore identify where the conflict lies. Please let us know of any conflicts you encounter in this way, and we can check whether a solution has been found.