Word & outlook interaction ??s...

We're considering building an Office automation application, and have a 
question about Outlook & Word interaction. If Word (2003) is selected as the 
Outlook eMail editor and our application has code which runs in the templat's 
Document_New and Document_open events...
1) is there a way to control which template is used when Outlook fires up 
word to create a new eMail message?
2) will that code run when an eMail message is being composed?
3) If that code runs and creates new Properties on the Document object 
(Document Metadata), will that metadata be saved/stored with the document 
when it becomes an email message?
4) if so, where would that metadata be found once Outlook/exchange stores 
the message?

Thanks for any insights anybody can share on these questions.

For use with WordMail the code actually should be running in Outlook. That 
is done using the NewInspector event of the Inspectors collection to get the 
newly opened item from Inspector.CurrentItem. If it's an email item and 
IsWordMail is True it will be a WordMail item.

From that MailItem.WordEditor you can get the Word document object.

-- 
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
 http://www.**--****.com/ 

Ken,

Thanks for the response!

Ok, this (and some other feedback I've gotten elsewhere) leads me to another 
question...or two.
Is it possible to store (hidden) metadata inside Outlook eMail messages 
(without resort to using file attachments or using Word as the email editor)?
if so...how?

This is all for Records Identification and implementing Corporate Records 
Retention Policy purposes.

Outlook items have a UserProperties collection that you can add a 
UserProperty to (or more than 1). That can serve to contain metadata of 
whatever types you want. Those would be visible to the user however if they 
select those fields in the Field Chooser or print the items.

For truly hidden metadata I always use MAPI named properties. Those are in 
the same namespace as Outlook UserProperties but invisible to the UI and can 
only be seen using a MAPI tool such as MFCMAPI or OutlookSpy.

You can't get there from here with the Outlook object model however. I use 
Redemption (www.dimastr.com/redemption) for that myself, an alternative 
would be to use CDO 1.21 or Extended MAPI to add those named properties to 
the items. I store all sorts of metadata on items that way.

-- 
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
 http://www.**--****.com/ 

Ken,

Thanks again! ...and did I mention how awesome you are?...

PS - Why did you choose redemtpion over the CDO or Extended MAPI alternatives?
...any there any major technical reasons (like deployment issues) I should 
factor into selecting from those alternatives (or any others)?

I do most of my programming in VB 6, with prototyping in VBA.

Extended MAPI in general requires C++ or Delphi, although you can do a few 
things using VB (see the MAPILabs example of using HrGetOneProp to get a 
PT_STRING8 value).

CDO is old and tired and will only be available in Outlook 2007 by download 
from MS. It's subject to the security prompts and hasn't been really updated 
for years, although it's certainly usable. It's an optional component that 
is non-distributable, so you have to demand install it from the Office CD or 
shared install point if it's not already installed.

Redemption can be customized for security, it now has all the power of CDO 
plus a some of the power and speed of Extended MAPI and it's 
redistributable. I've finished rewriting all my apps that use CDO to now use 
RDO objects in Redemption and now only use Redemption myself. YMMV.

If I use a .NET language, CDO and EX MAPI aren't supported for use across 
the Interop and some things won't work, or won't work all the time or work 
reliably. Redemption works fine across the Interop.

-- 
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
 http://www.**--****.com/ 

Ken,

Dang! ...Glad I asked!
So, what's Microsoft's "future direction" here, then?
Extended MAPI? ...so we're awaiting release of some new 
CDO.NET/XMAPI.NET/somethingorother from MS, or what?
...or are they just going to acquire "Redemption"?
<I like the notion of that salvationary double-entendre, at least> ;-)

Microsoft's future direction is clear, use .NET languages. That this is a 
less than compelling story for Office applications is another story.

There are no plans that I'm aware of to support Extended MAPI or CDO in .NET 
managed code and no plans that I'm aware of to make new builds of those 
API's for .NET compatibility.

This doesn't help at all if you have to support older versions of Office, 
but Outlook 2007 has a unified object model with access to Stores and Fields 
(PropertyAccessor) and just about anything else you can do with CDO or even 
Redemption. I can actually do real advanced Outlook programming in Outlook 
2007 only using the Outlook object model. VSTO V3 is also a very nice 
solution for .NET programming for Outlook 2007.

Of course in the real world my clients want support going back to Outlook 
2000, so VSTO and the wonderful work done on the OOM by the Outlook team 
doesn't help for that. Microsoft's answer of course will be for everyone to 
upgrade to Office 2007.

-- 
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
 http://www.**--****.com/ 

Ken,

Hmmm...I've read in the publicly available "Office 12" documents that they 
plan to release some upgrades to the Office 2k/03 versions so that those 
Office versions will read and wrte the newer "Office 12" XML document file 
formats after "Office 12" ships... Is there any chance, then that the VSTO v3 
_will_ be able to interface with the Outlook 2k/03 versions after the "Office 
12-compatibility update"? (not that I'll be holding my breath, understand)

You can use VSTO for Outlook 2003 and 2007. I don't expect anything for it 
for earlier versions, which are now out of mainstream support anyway.

I haven't heard about any plans to update earlier versions of Outlook at 
all. I'd be inclined to doubt it, but can you cite where you read that?

-- 
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
 http://www.**--****.com/ 

Ken,

Look here:  http://www.**--****.com/ 

Pay particular attention to the last bullet point at the bottom: compatibility
...which now that I read it again, probably only refers to Word, Excel, and 
Powerpoint documents, but...?<shrug>?

That's just for being able to use the new zipped file formats that Word, 
Excel and so on are going to use as defaults in Office 2007. It has nothing 
to do with Outlook, which won't be using those zipped formats so it's 
irrelevant to Outlook users.

MS plans to offer updates for older versions of Word, etc. so users can work 
with the new file formats. If they didn't the file formats would have little 
chance of being adopted by many organizations that need to maintain backward 
compatibility.

-- 
Ken Slovak
[MVP - Outlook]
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
Author: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Reminder Manager, Extended Reminders, Attachment Options
 http://www.**--****.com/