Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Travel Time for Outlook -- our first pass -- we want your feedback

We spend a lot of time making calendar data go into Office 365 / Microsoft Exchange.

So when one of us (Russ) needed to do all sorts of travelling for a community project he was on he immediately started wondering:  WHY is there no good way to add travel time to an appointment or meeting in Outlook?

February 2021 We've gotten three requests about this over the last few weeks.  If you're a corporate entity that's interested, drop us a line infoATsumatraDOTCOM.  We're in a soft re-opening of the code.

Of course since he runs the development group at Sumatra he was in a position to do something about it and over the past few months has been engaged in the admirable engineering tradition of skunk works projects.

Truth be told, EVERY project at Sumatra is skunk works, but no matter.

Herewith we invite you to try out our first pass at Travel Time for Outlook.  It's not as full-featured as we envision but it's as functional as other offerings we see people wanting to charge money for.  And we'll let you use this for free.

What this looks like on Office 365:

It's a small icon


Pressing that gives you these options:


Saving it gives you this:


So far pretty simple and we've got our directions for extending it.  But we're listeners.

You'll have to contact us for the URL to install from, but as long as you're willing to provide feedback we're game.

How to install this:




  • Choose Add-ins, My add-ins, Custom add-ins, Add a custom add-in, Add from URL


  • Contact us infoATsumatraDOTCOM for the URL to use.
  • Accept the warning, etc.., then close
  • Go to your calendar. Create or open an event
  • Select the Travel Time icon




Now you get to add travel and/or return time.

There's a lot more work to be done but this is a start and we'd welcome your input on how you're using it.