Troubleshoot the Tekst SidePanel

If the Tekst SidePanel does not load or stays empty, this guide helps you find the cause and the change needed to get it working.

For how to install the Tekst SidePanel in the first place, see Set up the Tekst SidePanel as an Outlook app or Set up the Tekst SidePanel as a browser extension.

Using the Tekst SidePanel as a browser extension?

The sections below cover the Tekst SidePanel as an Outlook app (add-in). If you use the browser extension, check these first:

• "Looking up conversation" keeps showing. The extension has not identified an item on this page yet. This is normal while a page is still loading, and it is also what you see on pages that are not a single item - a Salesforce list view, for example, or a record type the extension does not recognize. Open an individual conversation, case, or ticket. If the panel stays stuck on an item you know is supported, reload the tab and reopen the panel.
• "The automation is still running." The item was found, but no automation has finished for it yet. The panel updates automatically as soon as results arrive.
• "Nothing here." The item was found, but no automation produced actions for it. This is expected for items Tekst does not process.
• "Couldn't detect page context." The extension does not recognize this page at all. Check that you are on one of the supported tools: Outlook on the web, Salesforce cases, or SAP Service Cloud v1 tickets. If it is a platform your team needs, flag it with your account team - customer requests drive which platforms get added next.
• An "integration not found" message after logging in. The mailbox, Salesforce instance, or SAP tenant you are on is not connected to a Tekst integration. Contact your Tekst administrator.
• The panel shows the login screen again. Your session expired or you were signed out. Nothing loads until you sign in again. Make sure you pick the right method: "Log in" for username and password, "Log in via SSO" with your organization's subdomain for single sign-on.
• Approve is dimmed and clicking it does not submit. A required field is empty or a value is invalid. Clicking Approve highlights the fields that need attention, and hovering over the button explains what is blocking it. See Use the Approval Form in the Tekst SidePanel.
• "Already processed" when deciding an approval. Someone else decided it first, and nothing you did was lost. The card may keep showing as pending for a short while; close and reopen the panel to see the decision that was actually recorded.
• The panel shows a different item than the one you are looking at. The panel follows the page, so navigating to the right item refreshes it. If it lags behind, close and reopen the panel.
• Tekst unreachable. Check that api.tekst.com loads in a normal browser tab and is not blocked by a firewall, proxy, or content filter.
• Nothing loads at all. Confirm you are on a recent version of Chrome or Edge. Older versions, Firefox, and Safari are not supported.

If none of that helps, contact support@tekst.com and mention you are using the browser extension, your browser version, and what the panel shows.

Using the Outlook app: which Outlook are you using?

Most blocked cases in the Outlook app come down to a small number of setups that classic Outlook on Windows does not fully support, and each one has a fix that also leaves your configuration in a better, more secure state.

The Tekst SidePanel works out of the box on:

• Outlook on the web
• Outlook for Mac
• The new Outlook for Windows

Most of the edge cases in this guide are specific to Outlook desktop classic on Windows. If you have a choice, the fastest fix is to open the same mailbox in the new Outlook for Windows or in Outlook on the web, where the panel loads without any extra configuration.

One exception: a shared mailbox hidden from your organization's address list (see "The mailbox is hidden from the address list" below) blocks the panel on every Outlook client, not just classic Outlook on Windows, because it prevents the panel from getting any mailbox context at all.

If you have to stay on Outlook desktop classic on Windows, use the sections below based on what you see.

When the panel cannot load, it shows an error page

If the panel cannot start, it no longer spins forever. After a short timeout it shows an error page with a Copy diagnostics button.

Whenever you contact us about a panel that will not load, click Copy diagnostics and paste the result into your message to support@tekst.com. That report tells us exactly where the panel got stuck and usually lets us pinpoint the cause in one step.

The panel does not appear at all

Symptom: The Tekst panel stays blank and never renders any content.

Cause: The panel needs a modern rendering engine (WebGL 2) to draw its interface. Outlook desktop classic hosts add-ins inside the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime, which supports WebGL 2. On older or misconfigured machines, Outlook can fall back to the legacy Internet Explorer engine, which cannot render the panel.

Fix:

• Make sure Windows and Microsoft 365 (Outlook) are fully up to date.
• Install or update the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime.
• Restart Outlook after updating.

If the panel still does not appear after updating, click Copy diagnostics on the error page and send it to support@tekst.com.

The panel shows an error or does not finish loading

Work through these checks in order.

Open an email first. The panel only activates while you are reading a specific message. If you open it from the folder or inbox view with no email selected, it cannot get the mailbox context and times out. Open an email so it shows in the reading pane or its own window, then open the Tekst panel.

Confirm Tekst is reachable. In a browser on the same computer, check that api.tekst.com loads and is not blocked by a firewall, proxy, or content filter. If it is blocked, ask your IT team to allow it, then reopen the panel.

If Tekst is reachable and an email is open, the next step depends on whether you are working in a shared mailbox.

It is a personal mailbox

If the mailbox is your own (not a shared mailbox) and the panel still fails, click Copy diagnostics on the error page and send it to support@tekst.com. Personal-mailbox failures are usually something we need to look into directly, and the diagnostics report is what lets us do that quickly.

It is a shared mailbox

Most failures on Outlook desktop classic happen with shared mailboxes. Run the three checks below. The third one, automapping, is the cause we see most often.

1. The mailbox is hidden from the address list

If the shared mailbox is hidden from the Global Address List (GAL), the panel cannot resolve it and fails to load.

Fix (Microsoft 365 administrator):

• Open the Exchange admin center at admin.exchange.microsoft.com.
• Go to Recipients > Mailboxes and select the shared mailbox.
• Turn off Hide from my organization's address lists (also shown as "Hide from address lists") and save.
• Alternatively, run this in Exchange Online PowerShell:

Set-Mailbox -Identity "sharedmailbox@yourcompany.com" -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $false

• Allow a short time for the change to propagate, then restart Outlook and reopen the panel.

2. The mailbox was added by signing in with its own password

A shared mailbox should be reached through delegated access, not by adding it as a separate account and signing in with a username and password for the mailbox itself. Direct password sign-in is not a supported or secure setup, and the panel does not work reliably with it.

Fix:

• In Outlook, remove the directly added account: File > Account Settings > Account Settings, select the shared mailbox account, and click Remove.
• Have a Microsoft 365 administrator grant the user access instead (see the automapping steps below), so the mailbox is added through delegation rather than a password.
• As a best practice, the administrator should keep sign-in blocked for the shared mailbox account. Shared mailboxes do not need their own password, and blocking sign-in is more secure and keeps every action tied to the individual user who performed it.

3. The mailbox was not added through automapping

This is the most common cause. When an administrator grants a user Full Access to a shared mailbox, Outlook normally adds it automatically through automapping. Mailboxes added this way work with the panel. As a rule of thumb, if the user could open the mailbox through their normal permissions, the panel will work.

Problems appear when the mailbox was added by hand as an extra account (automapping off) instead of appearing automatically. Some teams do this deliberately to keep the local Outlook cache (OST file) from growing, but the panel does not load reliably in that setup.

Fix:

First, as a Microsoft 365 administrator, grant the user Full Access with automapping enabled. Either of these works:

• Microsoft 365 admin center (no Exchange admin role needed): go to admin.microsoft.com and open Teams & groups > Shared mailboxes. Select the mailbox, and under the members section click Edit to add the user. Adding a member this way grants Full Access and turns on automapping at the same time.
• Exchange admin center or Exchange Online PowerShell (useful for bulk changes or when you need to confirm automapping explicitly):

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity "sharedmailbox@yourcompany.com" -User "user@yourcompany.com" `
    -AccessRights FullAccess -AutoMapping $true

• If Full Access was previously granted with automapping turned off, remove it and add it again with automapping enabled:

Remove-MailboxPermission -Identity "sharedmailbox@yourcompany.com" -User "user@yourcompany.com" `
    -AccessRights FullAccess
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity "sharedmailbox@yourcompany.com" -User "user@yourcompany.com" `
    -AccessRights FullAccess -AutoMapping $true

• If Full Access was granted through membership in a security group rather than to the user directly, automapping never happens, no matter how long you wait or how often Outlook is restarted. Grant Full Access to the individual user's mailbox instead of the group.

Then, the user needs to make Outlook pick up the change:

• If the shared mailbox is currently added by hand (as its own account, or listed under the account's advanced "additional mailboxes" settings), remove that copy first so it does not conflict with the copy added through automapping.
• Fully close Outlook (exit completely, not just close the window) and reopen it. Outlook only rebuilds its mailbox list on startup, so a permission change granted while Outlook is running will not appear until it restarts.
• Permission changes can take a while to reach Outlook. If the mailbox still does not appear after a restart, wait and restart Outlook again.
• If it still does not appear, ask IT to recreate the Outlook profile (Control Panel > Mail > Show Profiles). This forces Outlook to run Autodiscover again and pick up the newly granted access.

Once the mailbox appears under the user's own account, select an email in it and open the Tekst panel to confirm it loads.

If you turned automapping off to control the size of the OST cache, see Slow shared mailboxes - cause and solution for other ways to keep the cache under control while keeping automapping on.

Using the new Outlook for Windows? A shared mailbox added through automapping shows up under Settings > Accounts > Shared with me rather than as a full account, with a Convert option to promote it. You do not need to convert it for the panel: reading email in it works either way. Converting is only needed if the user wants to manage the shared mailbox's own account settings.

The panel works on one network but not another

Symptom: The Tekst SidePanel loads at home but not at the office, or only when you are off the company VPN. Different people get different results on the same network, or the same person gets a different result at a different time.

Cause: This pattern points at the network, not at Tekst. Your Tekst permissions are the same wherever you sign in, so access never changes because you connected through a different network or turned your VPN on. When the result depends on location, something on the corporate network is blocking or altering part of what the panel needs: a web gateway or content filter, a proxy that inspects traffic, a policy that blocks popups, or a sign-in rule tied to a network location.

Being on the VPN normally counts as being inside the corporate network, so "it only works when I am off the VPN" and "it only works when I am on the VPN" are two versions of the same problem.

Check that each address loads

Open each of these in a normal browser tab on the computer where the panel fails, then repeat on a network where it works so you can compare the two. A block page, a certificate warning, or a page that never finishes loading means a gateway or proxy is stopping it.

Allow HTTPS on port 443 to all of them. See Troubleshoot Firewall for the full list of Tekst domains.

Check the policies around them

Even when every address loads, three settings can still block the panel:

• Popups from outlook.office.com. In Outlook on the web, signing in to the Tekst SidePanel opens a popup window. If a browser policy blocks popups for that site, sign-in fails without a clear message.
• Websocket traffic. The panel keeps a websocket connection to ws.tekst.com open for live updates. Some proxies allow the address but drop the websocket, which leaves the panel loading and never refreshing.
• Conditional access rules. If your identity provider has a policy scoped to a named location, a trusted IP range, or a device compliance state, it can accept a sign-in from one network and refuse it from another. Ask whoever manages your identity provider to check the sign-in logs for the affected user at the time of the failure.

If the address loads normally in a browser tab and the panel still fails, click Copy diagnostics and send the report to support@tekst.com, together with which networks you tested and what happened on each.

Still stuck?

If you have worked through the checks above and the panel still does not load, click Copy diagnostics on the error page and send it to support@tekst.com. Let us know which Outlook version you are using and whether it is a personal or shared mailbox. We are happy to join a short call to confirm the cause and walk through the change needed.