Exchange Messaging Outlook Volume 12, Number 6

In Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003 it was challenging to manipulate e-mail messages as they were routed through the organization or as they passed through the gateway to and from the internet. In those versions, SMTP was managed by an extended implementation of IIS SMTP. Controlling SMTP messages in simple ways, such as archiving, appending a disclaimer or implementing a catch-all mailbox, required coding (or borrowing code) SMTP Transport event sinks and registering them on the appropriate servers. While some functionality could be attained with VBScript, many sinks required Visual Basic, C# or C++ to meet the goals of the administrator. Exchange 2007 reverts to a proprietary SMTP implementation that exposes some basic message control during routing using a mechanism called Exchange 2007 Message Transport Rules.

Read the complete article here: Exchange 2007 Message Transport Rules

Ken Slovak, a well respected Outlook developer, discovered a problem with an Outlook toolbar add-in crashing Outlook and blaming the crash on other add-ins but the company who released the toolbar refuses to discuss it with him since he is not a registered user.

The problem is with an Outlook add-in called the Telephony Toolbar from Broadcom (http://info.onvoip.net/toolbar/) When the profile contains an Exchange account it crashes Outlook 2007 and any VB 6 add-in that handles Application and NameSpace events.

As soon as Outlook starts even a simple two line add-in in VB6 that does this:

Private WithEvents ol As Outlook.Application

' in OnConnection

Set ol = Application

The telephony toolbar causes a crash but the events and error dialogs place blame on other add-ins, not the toolbar. It came to Ken's attention because the combination of the telephony toolbar and Attachment Options caused a crash for a customer. He later discovered other problems: declaring NameSpace or Application WithEvents related to the toolbar add-in when running on any OS with Outlook 2007 with an Exchange account profile. The problems aren't limited to Ken's add-ins: as all good testers do, he tested it with several popular commercial Outlook add-ins and verified the crashes are not limited to his add-ins.

While we're hoping this VoIP add-in never gains wide usage, if you use it and have problems you'll know where the real problem lies.

When you use Outlook 2007 and your default message format is plain text, beware of the spell check bug. When you use the option to always check the spelling on sending, corrections don't stick and the message is sent with the misspelled words.

If you use spell check as you type, corrections appear seem to stick. HTML message format is not affected.

Outlook's printing abilities have always fell under the category of "leaves much to be desired" and Outlook 2007 shows little improvement. While Outlook does okay at printing emails (but could do better), contact images and business card views are not supported by the printer templates and calendar printing capabilities seem to get worse with each version.

The printing bugs in Outlook 2007 include broken line wrapping in the calendar. Daily events and locations are truncated instead of wrapping to the next line, while multi-day events that extend into the next week print into the margin at the end of the first week instead of wrapping into the next week.

Fortunately there is a workaround: the calendar printing assistant. It offers a number of templates and customizations, wraps lines as expected, and uses the traditional last month and next month thumbnail calendars.

Calendar Printing Assistant for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA101687211033.aspx

Calendar:

You'll have better options if you use a Word template to create the calendar. You can add clip art and background colors before printing or save it as HTML and email the document to others. The templates use last month and next month thumbnail calendars. The Calendar Printing assistant for Outlook 2007 also uses last month and next month for the small calendars.

Contacts:
Contact pictures are not included in printouts.

Email:
While you can't change the layout to avoid the user name in large letters at the top of the printout, if you use Word as the editor with Outlook 2003 or previous, you can hit forward then Print and you'll get just the To/From/Date/Subject header. Close the forward when finished. This doesn't work in Outlook 2007. You can open HTML messages in the browser to print, although this method removes both the username and the email header.

When you want to print just part of an email message, you can use the same methods above: print after hitting Forward if Word is the editor or view in Browser. You'll have the much better print dialog in Word or IE. Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 doesn't use Word's better print engine, it sticks with the old Outlook print engine.

Attachment names aren't included in the printouts in all versions of Outlook. If you need the attachment name and your version doesn't support it switch the message format to RTF. (Open the message, Edit, Edit message menu then change the format.)

If these workarounds don't meet your needs, there are Word templates and other printing tools available, including two commercial add-ins offering many print options.

Blueprint for Outlook
http://www.savvisoft.com/ 

Outlook Printer
http://www.outlookprinter.com/

Calendar Printing Tools for Outlook
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/calendar_print.asp

An Outlook 2007 user asks: "When I label an event with multiple categories, I would like to choose which category color the event takes on the day/week/month view. For instance, I have an event, two categories, Category A and Category B, each with different colors, but I would like to have the event in the view take the color of Category B, not Category A. "

Items in Outlook 2007 use the color of the last category you apply, so select Category B last.