Exchange Messaging Outlook
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Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 7, No. 21, 2 Apr 2003, of Exchange Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. Today's highlights:
Regular features:
Microsoft this week announced packaging for Office 2003, which will be released this summer. (One press report suggested a date conciding with the TechEd conference in early June.) As usual, Outlook appears in each bundle, but there are some new configurations. In addition to the bundles, Outlook 2003 will also be included with client access licenses for Exchange 2003, which will be released shortly before Office 2003. The leanest package, Office 2003 Basic Edition, consists of Outlook, Excel, and Word. You won't find it on store shelves, though. Basic Edition will be available only on new PCs. The next step up is Office 2003 Standard Edition and the Student and Teacher Edition, which both add PowerPoint to the mix. Standard Edition will also be available through Microsoft's volume licensing program for bulk purchases. A new bundle, Office 2003 Small Business Edition, consists of Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, and a new application, Business Contact Manager (BCM). Small Business Edition will be available through retail channels, on new PCs, and through the volume licensing program. BCM is an Outlook COM addin -- the first that I know of built on the .NET platform -- that stores contact information in a relational database but uses Outlook for the user interface. I'll have a lot more to say about BCM in coming weeks. The high-end package is Office 2003 Professional Edition, which has all the products in Small Business Edition, plus Microsoft Access. A key feature that distinguishes the Pro package is that its versions of Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint will support Microsoft's new Information Rights Management feature (see " Rights Management in Office 2003" below). Companies that purchase the Pro version through volume licensing will get an additional program in their bundle -- InfoPath, Microsoft's new forms application. Available only as standalone applications will be FrontPage 2003 and, the new note-taking tool, OneNote 2003. For a complete listing of all the different bundles, see http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/office/factsheet/OfficeSKUFS.asp. Exchange 2000 post-SP3 rollup Microsoft has released a cumulative patch for problems fixed since Exchange 2000 SP3. If you installed the March 10, 2003 version of this rollup, you must uninstall it before you apply the latest version. See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=813840 for download details and a link to all the fixes. Updated Exchange 2000 SDK `Another new download for Exchange 2000 shops is the updated SDK, which Microsoft refreshes quarterly. You can find the Exchange SDK March 2003 edition tools and documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/exchange/ along with a new article on how to use .NET managed code to write event sinks. New to the SDK is information on how to create a contact using WebDAV from either a client or a server application. The SDK continues to add .NET content and now includes a managed treeview control for Exchange and a notification sample for handling subscriptions to a public folder. Rights Management in Office 2003 Companies who want to prevent certain messages from being printed, forwarded, or copied will find a solution in Office 2003, which supports the new rights management features in Windows 2003 Server. RM support will be available only in the Office 2003 Professional bundle, however, Microsoft announced this week. Microsoft is currently operating a free public RM server for use by Office 2003 beta testers and said during a chat last week that the current plan is to keep the server free for at least a year. Companies can also run their own internal RM servers using a component that will be available after Windows 2003's release later this month, with the advantage that an in-house server can support more granular rights templates. Using RM in Outlook 2003 is a piece of cake. Once you walk through a brief signon procedure that includes validation of your Microsoft Passport, all you have to do is click a toolbar button to secure your outgoing message. Right now, it only works with other Outlook 2003 users, but next month, Microsoft plans to release an Internet Explorer component that will allow other Windows users to read an HTML rendering of the message. Office 2003 also supports RM on individual Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. If you're interested in some of the technical background, check out my article at http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=38326. Does the inclusion of RM in a mainstream application like Office mean that S/MIME, PGP, and other digital signing techniques will fall by the wayside? I don't think so. Microsoft's implementation of rights management secures the content of documents and messages, but it doesn't provide authentication to assure you that a document or message really came from the purported sender. Office XP SP3 in the works? Lest we forget the current version of Outlook, it looks like a third service pack for Office XP is coming eventually. We're starting to see articles crop in the Microsoft Knowledgebase with a kbofficexppresp3fix keyword. The most intriguing is that the Outlook View Control is (finally!) getting a SelectedDate property that returns the date the user has selected in a calendar. If you are a developer who needs this functionality right now, you can contact Microsoft Support for the hotfix detailed in the KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=812480. Outlook 2003 side-by-side calendars Let's wrap up this issue with one more cool new Outlook 2003 feature -- side-by-side calendars. When you click the Calendar button in Outlook 2003, you'll see your own default Calendar folder, along with a list of other calendar folders in your mailbox, active Personal Folders .pst files, and the Exchange Public Folder\Favorites. Click the check box next to any of these calendars to display it side-by-side. Note that public folders must be listed in the Favorites hierarchy in order for them to be available for side-by-side viewing. |
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New Utilities |
COMPANY MANAGER http://www.sell-net.com/compman.asp Manage Outlook contacts through an organization chart interface. Automatically sets the values for Manager and Assistant. Exports picture of chart to other programs. EXTRACT MICROSOFT OUTLOOK EMAILS TO DATABASE WS:RESPONSE SUITE |
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Updated utilities |
MARCH 2003 EXCHANGE 2000 SERVER POST-SERVICE PACK 3 ROLLUP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=813840 Cumulative patch for problems fixed since the release of Exchange 2000 SP3. If you installed the March 10, 2003 version of this rollup, you must uninstall it before you apply the latest version. MATADOR SMARTNOTE |
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Other new resources |
MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SDK MARCH 2003 http://msdn.microsoft.com/exchange/ Updated documentation and tools for developing Exchange 2000 applications. WRITING MANAGED SINKS FOR SMTP AND TRANSPORT EVENTS |
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More Information |
Click here to subscribe to the Exchange Messaging Outlook newsletter. Exchange Messaging Outlook Newsletter back issues ISSN 1523-7990 |
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Updated Dec 14 2009
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