Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange

Explains how to use Visual Basic to customize the personal information management system while developing collaborative systems using the Exchange server

Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange is a thorough guide for building collaborative applications such as threaded discussions and electronic business documents. Early on, the book describes four types of collaborative applications: messaging, tracking, workflow, and real-time applications. Author Thomas Rizzo shows the strengths of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server for collaboration, including the many built-in security and administration features.

Rizzo also covers Outlook 98 development, explaining how to customize folders, fields, and views (including rules and filtered replication of messages). He then shows how to create Outlook forms, with instruction on how to use components and add VBScript event handlers. An account tracking application demonstrates all the basics on this topic.

The second half of the book is strong on building Web-based collaborative applications and covers Web tools such as Outlook Today and the Outlook HTML Form Converter. Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) objects are fully explained, showing how they can be built with ASPs and viewed in a browser. Rizzo provides excellent samples for a help desk, a calendar of events, and an intranet news application, and carefully lists the exact versions of various Microsoft tools required to run each example successfully.

The book closes with material on the Event Scripting Agent and Exchange Server Routing Objects, which provide fault-tolerant message delivery. --Richard Dragan