Today's highlights:
- Outlook as a business application
- Contact form quirks & limitations
- My favorite tools
- Fax in Windows 2000
Outlook as a business application
I've weathered quite a few discussions lately on the topic of why
Outlook does not work just like Act!, GoldMine or <fill in the
blank with your own favorite contact manager>. It's very
frustrating to move from one system to another, swallowing all the
marketing hype, only to learn that to make Outlook perform the
integration of data that you expect in an industrial-strength
contact manager takes a considerable investment in programming. It
just doesn't work that way out of the box.
The number-one frustration seems to be that there is no easy way
to customize a form with a drop-down list that allows the user to
pick an item in an folder or in a database and populate matching
fields on the Outlook form. It's not even that obvious how to do it
in code! (If you want to see some samples, check some of the latest
threads in the microsoft.public.outlook.program_forms and
microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba newsgroups.)
That said, there are some good tools for managing the interaction
of Outlook with other folders and databases. To name a few:
The ADO Data control and Microsoft Data Grid control from
Office 2000 Developer Edition or Visual Studio. Randy Byrne's Building
Applications with Microsoft Outlook 2000 book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0735605815/cdolivthepremier)
includes a good explanation of how to use these.
The Outlook View Control control, included with the Team
Folders and Digital
Dashboard kits from Microsoft, makes it very easy to view data
from other folders (say, a master Calendar folder while you're
trying to set up a meeting or plan a vacation), though it can
function as a selection tool only when used in a folder home page.
The Outlook Extensions Library from http://www.teamscope.com
includes quite a few functions for adding better selection and
other functions to Outlook forms, and it works with any version of
Outlook, not just Outlook 2000.
If your organization doesn't have the in-house resources to
customize Outlook as a contact management tool, take a look at what
has already been done in this area:
And don't forget that you can always write Microsoft at mailto:outwish@microsoft.com
to make specific suggestions for the next version.
Contact form quirks & limitations
While we're on the subject of contact management, let's look at
some of the quirks related to customizing the Contact form in
Outlook. If you understand these from the beginning, you'll spend
less time beating your head against the wall.
#1: Outlook 97 cannot open forms where the first page has been
customized in Outlook 98 or Outlook 2000.
#2: If you customize the first page of the Contact form, the
feature that automatically formats telephone numbers no longer
works.
#3: When you drag a contact using a customized form to the Inbox,
it does not create a message addressed to the contact. Instead, you
get a message with the contact details in the body. You can see this
even more clearly if you drag the item with the right mouse button.
The resulting pop-up menu is missing the Address Message to Contact
command that's the default when you drag a contact using the default
Contact form. One workaround is to instruct your users in how to
right-click a contact, then choose New Message to Contact from the
context menu.
#4: The names you see in the Field Chooser are not necessarily
the same as the actual property names that you would use in code.
For example, what you see as the Company field is actually the
CompanyName field. There's a topic in Help on this -- Outlook Fields
and Equivalent Properties. Too bad that Help in Office no longer
includes the ability to bookmark favorite topics like this.
Things you cannot do with the contact form:
Add address fields to the Business, Home, Other list or change
the labels on the drop-down list for the built-in address fields
Add telephone fields to the drop-down list of built-in phone
fields or change the labels for the built-in fields
Add more e-mail address fields
Customize the Details page
Use the "Send plain text only" checkbox in
Corporate/Workgroup mode or get the value of that property through
the Outlook object model in IMO mode (In fact, we haven't been
able to even figure out what property it is. Maybe CDO can help.)
Have you found other limitations that keep the Contact form from
behaving as you'd expect or want? Drop me a line at mailto:emo@slipstick.com,
and I'll add to this list in the next issue.
My favorite tools
People often ask what third-party utilities I recommend for
Outlook users. There are hundreds of good tools for Outlook, and
what works for me may not do as well for you. I realize, though,
that it's hard to decide which to use or even which to try. So, here
are the three that I use every day:
Email Templates (http://www.nsoftware.com)
-- Anybody who receives as much e-mail as I do can't get by
without some kind of tool for applying stock responses to
messages. ET can be scripted to insert information from the
incoming message into your reply (or forward, etc.) and refile the
original message when you're done. ET templates can also be used
as custom actions in Rules Wizard, which vastly expands what you
can do with Rules Wizard. Works with all versions of Outlook. The
web site has other examples of cool things you can do with just a
little scripting.
Micro Eye ZipOut (http://www.microeye.com)
-- I'll admit that the fact that my fellow MVP Randy Byrne had a
lot to do with this utility, but that's not the only reason I like
it. It automatically compresses outgoing attachments, but you can
also use it to compress atttachments in items already stored in
your folder. Outlook 2000 only, because it's a COM addin.
Personal Folders Backup (http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/2000/downloaddetails/Pfbackup.htm)
-- It's free, and it does a good job of backing up my PST files. I
just have to remember to shut down Outlook 15 minutes before I
want to turn the computer off, to give the backup utility time to
do its work.
Besides these, I largely use tools I've built myself -- e.g., a
custom form for sending Internet faxes and various Outlook 2000 VBA
routines, like the ZapHTML tool at http://www.slipstick.com/dev/code/zaphtml.htm.
Fax in Windows 2000
This week, of course, sees the release of Windows 2000. In our
little EMO corner of the world, Windows 2000 passes two milestones.
First, it marks the end of Windows Messaging as an operating system
component. Windows 95, Windows 98 (if you know where to look) and
Windows NT 4.0 all included Windows Messaging as a way of connecting
not just to Internet mail servers, but also to Microsoft Mail and
other in-house servers. In Windows 2000, though, you see the
completion of the migration to Internet mail. Out with Windows
Messaging, in with Outlook Express to allow you to connect to POP,
IMAP, NNTP and LDAP servers.
For most users, though, the passing of Windows Messaging is just
a blip. Much more exciting is the return of a supported fax service
to Windows. The Microsoft Fax component included in Windows 95 has
gone without significant updates for years and is now buried on the
Windows 98 CD. There was a Personal Fax for Windows NT
"technology preview," but it never made it to release and
was quietly withdrawn. Small Business Server was the first version
of Windows since Windows 95 to include a fax component -- a
full-blown fax server with a client that worked either standalone or
as a MAPI transport in Outlook. However, since SBS was limited to
small offices, few people have had a chance to use this fax server.
With Windows 2000, if setup detects a fax modem, it automatically
installs Outlook Express Fax, which you can configure using the Fax
icon in Control Panel and Start | Programs | Accessories |
Communications | Fax. It will deliver faxes to your Outlook Inbox if
you're using Outlook in Corporate/Workgroup mode. The MSKB article
at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q246/1/51.asp
provides some details (though not enough). As we learn more about
this feature, we'll post updates at http://www.slipstick.com/addins/services/win2000fax.htm.
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