Exchange and Outlook UPDATE, Outlook Edition, February 11, 2003
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Exchange and Outlook UPDATE, Outlook Edition--brought to you by Exchange & Outlook Administrator, the print newsletter with practical advice, how-to articles, tips, and techniques to help you do your job today. http://www.exchangeadmin.com
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February 11, 2003--In this issue:
1. COMMENTARY - Seeing All the Fields in a Custom Message Form
2. ANNOUNCEMENT - Catch the Microsoft Mobility Tour--Time Is Running Out!
3. HOT RELEASE (ADVERTISEMENT) - e-Gap Webmail Appliance/Whale Communications
4. RESOURCE - Tip: Why Outlook Views Have Blank Fields
5. NEW AND IMPROVED - Monitor and Track Exchange Performance
6. CONTACT US See this section for a list of ways to contact us.
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1.
COMMENTARY
(contributed by Sue Mosher, News Editor, [email protected])* SEEING ALL THE FIELDS IN A CUSTOM MESSAGE FORM
Newcomers to Outlook forms are often surprised that fields that might be visible when the sender is entering data in a custom message form are nowhere to be seen when the recipient opens the message. The three principal causes of this frustrating phenomenon all have relatively straightforward solutions.
If the recipient sees a typical message instead of the custom form, the problem might be that the recipient doesn't have access to the published form that defines the custom form's layout. Inside an Exchange Server organization, you can solve that problem by publishing any custom message form to the Organizational Forms library. If you don't have permission to publish to that central library, then each potential sender and recipient needs to publish the form, with the same message class name, to his or her Personal Forms library.
Is publishing the form to a public folder's forms library a solution? No. Although potential senders can access the form to create new messages, Outlook doesn't know to look in the public folder when a recipient opens the message, so Outlook will use the default form instead of the custom form to show the message.
The second situation occurs when the sender and recipients have access to the published form but recipients still don't see the desired custom layout. In this case, the problem might be that the designer customized only the compose layout. By default, the main page of an Outlook message form consists of separate layouts for composing and reading messages. Outlook doesn't automatically copy fields from the compose layout to the read layout. That's the form designer's job.
A third situation in which a form might appear to be missing fields can occur when the user's interaction with the form makes certain data-entry controls visible or hidden. A typical form might use VBScript code to display a set of data-entry controls when the sender selects a check box on the message form. The sender enters data in the now-visible controls, then sends the message. But when the recipient opens it, the controls are hidden again.
This problem occurs because changes made to the look of an Outlook form at runtime aren't persistent. Outlook has no automatic mechanism for saving the state of the UI when a user sends a message. The only information saved with the message is the data itself (i.e., the values of the built-in Outlook properties and any custom properties associated with the custom form). When the recipient opens the message, the form displays the original layout of the published form.
You might already have guessed the solution: The data-entry controls originally became visible because VBScript code ran when the sender selected the check box. Therefore, you can use VBScript code to make the controls visible again when the recipient opens the item. The key to this technique is that before sending the message, you store information that the code can use to reset the control state when the recipient opens the item.
You don't necessarily need to store information about the control state itself. In most cases, the desired control state depends on some Outlook property, built-in or custom, for which the user has entered a value. Let's return to the example of selecting a check box to reveal an additional control, say a text box that shows the value of the Mileage property. If the sender enters data in that text box, you probably don't need to save information about the state of the check box. The fact that the sender has entered Mileage data indicates that the sender wants to display to the recipient of the message the text box bound to the Mileage property.
If the state of certain controls depends on certain data values, you can use more VBScript behind the form to check those data values and turn controls on or off when the recipient opens the item. Every Outlook item supports an Open event that fires when the user opens the item in its own window. By using the Open event handler to check the values of various properties in the item, the code can determine how to display different controls-–make them visible, hide them, perhaps even change their text or background colors to highlight key information. As long as the recipient has access to the published custom form, there's no reason that the message displayed with that custom form can't look exactly as the sender intended it to.
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2.
ANNOUNCEMENT
(brought to you by Windows & .NET Magazine and its partners)* CATCH THE MICROSOFT MOBILITY TOUR--TIME IS RUNNING OUT! This outstanding seven-city event will help you support your growing mobile workforce. Industry guru Paul Thurrott discusses the coolest mobility hardware solutions around, demonstrates how to increase the productivity of your "road warriors" with the unique features of Windows XP and Office XP, and much more. You could also win an HP iPAQ Pocket PC. There is no charge for these live events, but space is limited, so register today! Sponsored by Microsoft, HP, and Toshiba. http://www.winnetmag.com/seminars/mobility
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HOT RELEASE (ADVERTISEMENT)
* E-GAP WEBMAIL APPLIANCE/WHALE COMMUNICATIONS Secure OWA from Any Browser, Anywhere Avoid IIS and Exchange vulnerabilities. Enable web access to corporate email, shared folders and files. Click for white paper on protecting and enabling remote access to corporate resources. http://www.whalecommunications.com/exchangeoutlook/022103.htm
4.
RESOURCE
(contributed by Sue Mosher, [email protected])* TIP: WHY OUTLOOK VIEWS HAVE BLANK FIELDS
Q: I added Business Phone and a few other contact fields to my view of the Tasks folder, but the phone numbers for the contacts in my tasks don't appear in the view. What did I do wrong?
A: The only thing you did wrong was to expect too much from Outlook. The program simply doesn't work the way you imagine it should. In particular, it doesn't function like a relational database that combines data from multiple tables into one query response.
Outlook lets you drag any kind of built-in field to a folder view, but the view still shows only the data for that particular folder. The Business Phone data exists in the contact's record in the Contacts folder, not in the task in the Tasks folder that you have linked to that contact. Therefore, the field in the Tasks folder view will always be blank. You can get to the contact's phone number, though, by opening the task and double-clicking the underlined name in the Contacts box at the bottom of the task window.
See the Exchange & Outlook Administrator Web site for more great tips from Sue Mosher. http://www.exchangeadmin.com
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NEW AND IMPROVED
(contributed by Carolyn Mader, [email protected])* MONITOR AND TRACK EXCHANGE PERFORMANCE Argent Software announced Argent Exchange Monitor, software that can monitor and track Exchange Server performance. Features include realtime scanning and tracking capability, automatic scheduling of report distribution, full ActiveX and Crystal Reports integration, and agent-optional installation. You can concurrently monitor as many as 2000 Exchange servers that are located anywhere. Argent Exchange Monitor features an n-tier architecture to monitor any number of configurations and support any size network. Argent Exchange Monitor supports Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 5.5 environments. For pricing, contact Argent Software at 860-674-1700 or [email protected]. http://www.argent.com
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CONTACT US
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Thank you for reading Exchange and Outlook UPDATE. __________________________________________________________ Copyright 2003, Penton Media, Inc.
