

It is not needed when you do not have any Exchange accounts configured in Outlook. Required for various Exchange account features. This add-in no longer exists in Outlook 2016 and later. If you are not connected to a SharePoint site, you do not need it. Mainly used for integrating external SharePoint data in Outlook. Below is an overview of these add-ins with an indication of when you really need it to have it enabled. The default add-ins which are added depend on your version of Outlook and which additional applications from the Office Suite you have installed (so some might not be listed for you, which is OK). Still, you are free to disable them if you don’t use them. The default add-ins that ship with Outlook are designed not to slow down Outlook in any way if you do not need them.

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To see which add-ins you have installed and for instructions on how to disable them see: Enable/Disable add-ins. But as you’ve probably installed these type of add-ins more consciously, we’ll leave them out of this overview. Then there are of course a whole lot of other add-ins which are primarily focused on adding functionality to Outlook. In any case, they are not needed for proper operation of Outlook itself. Whether those are needed depends on if and how you use that application. In addition, other Microsoft applications or 3rd party applications could add some add-ins to Outlook as well.

Not all of them are activated and not all the ones which are activated by default are needed in every configuration. Outlook indeed already comes with its own set of add-ins. Which add-ins do I really need and which are safe to disable? I now try to “weed out” the additional add-ins hoping that it will improve my Outlook startup time as it is fast when launching Outlook in Safe Mode. I thought I was just using “plain vanilla” Outlook without add-ins but apparently Outlook already comes with some pre-installed and some others were added by installing other applications. I checked the list of add-ins that I have installed for Outlook and I’m a bit surprised how many I have installed.
