Building Applications with Microsoft Outlook Version 2002

On its own, Outlook Today is nice; customize it and you've got a full-fledged corporate portal (or, in Microsoft-speak, a "Digital Dashboard"). Outlook's calendars and task lists are nice; customize them and you can get your entire organization working together more efficiently. Outlook's built-in email forms are nice; customize them and you can build full-fledged workflow applications to streamline virtually any business process.

To build custom Outlook 2002 applications, Microsoft developers draw upon many skills that are applicable elsewhere -- for example, VB/VBA and COM expertise. But they must also master techniques and technologies that are unique to Outlook, Exchange, and SharePoint -- for example, Web Parts and the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit.

Randy Byrne has long been one of the world's leading experts on Outlook customization. Now, he's organized his knowledge into the definitive book on the subject: Building Applications with Microsoft Outlook Version 2002. In nearly 900 pages, he covers everything from Outlook's design tools to customizing existing modules to building new applications from scratch.

You'll start with the design tools: Outlook Form Design Mode, which you can use to control a form's properties, and the VBA integrated development environment, where you write the code that makes the form work. Byrne walks through customizing built-in forms, views, and folders. Next, in a 70-page case study, he shows how to build a custom discussion application that can help everyone in a company submit, share, and collaborate on new product ideas -- and organizing the correspondence in a public folder that serves as a definitive history for the company's new product discussions.

Discussion applications such as this offer fertile opportunities for adaptation -- perhaps for feedback or technical support, or for access to internal "reviews" of your vendors.

Once you understand what's involved in building custom Outlook applications, Byrne takes a closer look at the "building blocks" of Outlook applications. You'll find detailed chapters on modifying forms; on controls, fields, and properties; and on Actions -- for example, voting actions that can be used to poll your colleagues on a course of action, and reply actions that might be used in a form which streamlines the coordination of vacation requests. You'll also walk through every aspect of creating new folders, from planning to publishing, designing folder views to setting permissions.

These are the basics; but Building Applications with Microsoft Outlook Version 2002 covers much more than that. The book offers code for a wide variety of tasks: modifying command bars, creating programmatic searches; changing views; setting folders for offline use; creating, using, and posting standard and custom items; specifying an item's recipient; finding items in folders; and much more. Byrne's code examples are written in VBScript, but most can be extended easily in VBA, now that Outlook finally has full VBA support.

You'll find coverage of supercharging Outlook with trusted COM add-ins (and of the implications of Outlook's controversial email security changes for developers). Then, in the book's second complete case study, Byrne showcases Outlook 2002's excellent contact management features. The application he builds makes it possible to share, track, and manage contacts across corporations, departments, or workgroups -- even when users are offline.

Says Byrne, "Unlike database applications that require time-consuming table schema and stored procedure coding, Outlook contact applications can be developed rapidly using either default or custom contact items." Default Outlook contact items have over 100 default properties -- that's 100 wheels you don't have to reinvent!

Byrne shows how to distribute and secure your custom applications; how to integrate Outlook with web applications; and how to create Digital Dashboards that draw upon data from multiple sources. There's a lot of power hidden under the surface of that Outlook client. Unleash it, with Building Applications with Microsoft Outlook Version 2002.
(Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition. Edition.