Routed Message Form for Microsoft Outlook

The Routed Message Form by Jay Harlow is a Microsoft Outlook custom message form that can be used to send a message sequentially to a list of Outlook recipients. It uses a custom RouteTo text field to keep track of the recipients while the form is being routed to the next person in the To box. This form demonstrates several basic Outlook form design techniques:

• Custom actions, defined on the (Actions) page in design mode, firing code in the Item_CustomAction event handler
• Code for the Send event that fires when the user sends a message based on this form

Prerequisite

To use this form, you must be able to publish it to the Organizational Forms library on the in-house Exchange Server. It cannot be used to collect data from recipients outside your organization.

Setup

1. Download the Routemsg.zip file (5kb), then extract the Routemsg.oft file that it contains.
2. In Outlook, choose Tools | Forms | Choose Form.
3. At the top of the Choose Form dialog, select User Templates in File System.
4. Navigate to the folder that you used in Step 1 to extract the Routemsg.oft file.
5. Click Open.
6. Publish the form to the Organization Forms library so that every one in your organization can use it. Do NOT check the Send form definition with item box on the (Properties) page of the form.

Usage

To create a routed message:

1. Choose Tools | Forms | Choose Form, then select either Organizational Forms, select Routed Message, and click Open.
2. In the To box, enter the addresses you want the form routed to, in the order you want them to receive the message. Enter your own address last if you want to receive the message after everybody else has responded.
3. Click Send.

When a recipient receives the message, he/she sees the message is addressed to him/her only. There is a Route To box containing the list of names who have not yet received the message. When the recipient is done with the message, he/she clicks Route to send it to the next person.

The last recipient does not see any names in the Route To box.

How It Works

The VBScript attached to this form has two routines:

• Item_Send - deletes all of the recipients except the first one, after saving the display names of the recipients in the RouteTo custom text field.

• Item_CustomAction - looks for the Route action, which is defined on the (Actions) page, to send the message to the next recipient. When the last recipient uses the Route action, nothing happens. Jay did not not implement any "Return to originator" feature, but the originator could simple add himself as the last person in the To field when composing a new Routed Message.

Using these two routines, one should be able to use this form to build more complex routing forms. For example, if you saved the name of the originator (Application.Session.CurrentUser.Name) in another custom text field, you could add code in the Item_Forward or Item_Send event hander that would send the Originator an e-mail whenever the message was forwarded.