Webex Outlook Addin and Outlook 2007

If, like me, you live and die by Webex, you might have been as frustrated as I was to find that the Outlook add-in for Webex (which allows you to schedule online meetings right from your Outlook calendar) doesn’t install on Outlook 2007. I was quite surprised to find this, actually, since I had happily been running it on my old computer. But I realized I had actually migrated it—I had originally installed it against Outlook 2003, and it had happily continued to work when I upgraded to Outlook 2007.

So I hacked my way into making it work. Basically all you have to do is start from a working installation of the add-in (downloadable from your Webex account page), then copy the binary files from the Webex program files directory to the machine with Outlook 2007, register the DLLs, then add a registry entry that registers the add-in. On my machine, the registry entry for the last step looks like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOfficeOutlookAddinsOutlookAddin.Addin]
"FriendlyName"="ADOutlook2K Addin"
"Description"="ATLCOM Outlook Addin"
"LoadBehavior"=dword:00000003
"CommandLineSafe"=dword:00000000

Note that installing this WILL NOT work unless the DLLs from the add-in have properly been registered.

Once I did the above steps, I simply recorded my sign-in information and was able to start scheduling meetings again. Yee haw.

Update: Apparently WebEx has fixed this issue, though it doesn’t explain why I had to hack and post about it before anyone told us that it was an issue, much less that they had fixed it. Sigh.