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Today's highlights:
Regular features:
Exchange 2007 Message Transport RulesIn 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
A Bad Add-in with No SupportKen 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.
Bug: Plain Text Spell CheckWhen 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.
Printing Problems in Outlook 2007 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
Printing HintsCalendar:
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
Ordering Category ColorsAn 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.
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