Hi @OSTMOST,
First, let me apologize; I was wrong when I said
I had thought that all Office 365 plans used Exchange Server but now I see that only the Office 365 Business plans (and not even all tiers of Office 365 Business) use Exchange Server.
@Marie, FYI this page is a good reference for what all of the Office 365 plans are (Home, Business, Enterprise) and which ones include Exchange Server and thus can work with the Asana add-in (the “Services Included” section of each plan shows whether it includes Exchange or not):
https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-office-products?tab=2
Second, Dennis, as to
The reason is that Microsoft has provided two completely different technologies for adding into Outlook. The older technology is COM Add-ins; a COM Add-in is an application that’s installed directly on a user’s Windows PC. The newer technology is called Office Add-ins and here the code is web-based and is initiated from a server; for Office 365 that server is Exchange.
Microsoft has now put all of its developer eggs in the Office Add-ins basket; while it’s still possible to write and distribute COM Add-ins, Microsoft is pushing the use of Office Add-ins and basically has stopped doing any work on COM Add-in technology. (If you want a technical description of the advantages of Office Addins, you can find one here.)
I’m not privy to Asana’s decision-making but can speculate as to two reasons why they chose the path they did. First because Office Add-ins are the preferred technology to use these days per Microsoft edict, and second, remember that Asana’s current focus is on teams and enterprises, and it’s pretty likely that those teams/organizations using Outlook are running against an Exchange Server. To provide both a COM Add-in and an Office Add-in solution would have required essentially twice the development effort, and so they chose the technology that they assessed would best fit their target market. Again that’s just my speculation.
Lastly, Dennis, there is a 3rd party COM Add-in-based solution for Asana which you might want to check out:
@James_Carl can help you with any Sendana-related questions you might have.