Technical Tip: Why the Reveal add-in 'caused Outlook to start slowly'

The Reveal Outlook plugin can be identified as 'slow' potentially due to an error in how Outlook add-ins are recognised.

Outlook identifies and (optionally) disables add-ins that decrease performance. The Reveal add-in can be identified as one of those add-ins, even in situations where the 'average delay' is within Microsoft's published criteria. For example, an average delay of 0.23 seconds (shown in the screenshot below) is still considered a violation.

Why is this happening:

It is unclear as to why the Reveal Outlook add-in is identified in this way. Details of the thresholds can be found in this article from Microsoft.

For example:

One potential cause is related to the way Outlook loads different plugins, and if they require also loading a .NET framework to function. In such instances, the first plugin to load this framework may be penalized, even though it is then shared by others.

Can this pop-up be suppressed:

As this pop-up is triggered by the Outlook application specifically, Reveal cannot currently suppress it. Registry settings are in place to ensure the add-in continues to be loaded even if Outlook reports it as 'slow'. Unfortunately, the only known way to completely avoid the warning is to disable the add-in installation.