Now that I have moved us over to Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) completely, I have been fighting with Outlook to get a decent user / email experience.

It just doesn't seem to flow well - I got the SMTP/IMAP send/receive stuff all set up and working correctly, but it's clunky.

I have all the folders appearing in my Outlook client but the UX just does not flow - in order to LABEL a email (in google terms) I have to move it to a folder named as the LABEL I want to apply (if I want to label it 'Outdoor' I simply move it to the 'Outdoor' folder). Equally, anything I have labelled will be visible in that folder (if I labelled it 'Outdoor' then it'll be in my 'Outdoor' folder).

There are plenty of sites with step by step guides for configuring Outlook with GoogleMail, so I wont go into that but I will share this tip:

To download full emails (not just headers) you need to do the following :-

• Tools -> Send/Receive -> Send/Receive Settings -> Define Send/Receive Groups...
• Select the group your IMAP account is in (typically 'All Accounts')
• Click 'Edit'
• Select the account if there is more than one
• Select the option for 'Download complete items' (this is different for OL2003 and OL2007, below is OL2003)

However the biggest pain with Outlook is that it does not by default open in any account that does not have the usual default folders (Contacts, Calendar, Inbox etc).

As a Google IMAP account does not have these it automatically adds a 'Personal Folders' PST file and opens at the Inbox folder folder of that instead.

I am pretty much settled on letting OL grab a copy of my mail (just in case I need to edit offline), but am finding myself using Google's web mail interface most of the time.

Just changed all my email / calendar stuff to Google Apps for Your Domain (GAYD). It was a breeze to do, took around an hour all in and now all email access is IMAP and Web.

The reason I chose this setup was so that all email and calendar data is stored by google, which is much less likely to loose data that I am (HDD crash, theft, fire, flood etc).

As part of the reconfiguration I changed my usual mail IMAP settings on my WM6 device (Pocket Outlook). After changing all the settings I was surprised to find that it simply didn't work.
After much trial and error I found that WM6 didn't seem to want to swap from non SSL connections for SSL connections.

The 'fix' was simply to delete the original account and then create a brand new one. All is fine and dandy now...

Today, I wanted to configure an Outlook 2007 rule to process RSS items as they are received. By process I mean I wanted to check for attachments/enclosures, if it had any MP3s attached/enclosed then save them to a folder on my desktop (that way I simply sync my Creative Zen Vision: M with the desktop folder and I have all my podcasts available for my commute).

 I could not seem to get the Outlook rules engine working correctly on RSS feeds, I wanted to run a script (a function I'd written in Outlook VBA) that was executed every time I receive a RSS item.
The 'Run A Script' action in the rules wizard will only list subroutines with a signature like this:

Sub Foo(objItem As MailItem)

Anyway this doesn't work for RSS items as their message class is IPM.Post.RSS (making them a PostItem object). So this is a bit of a pain and means I cannot process RSS items using a rule.
In the end I had to use the following code to do it - I just open the folder of the RSS feed and run this (via a custom toolbar button) and it does it all for me.

Public Sub SaveRSSEnclosures()
   
    Dim att As Attachment, objList As Object, objItem As Object, iCount As Integer
   
    Set objList = Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items
    iCount = 0
   
    For Each objItem In objList
   
       If (objItem.Attachments.Count > 0) And (objItem.UnRead) Then
   
           ' iterate through looking for .mp3's
           For Each att In objItem.Attachments
    
               If LCase(Right(att.FileName, 3)) = "mp3" Then
             
                   ' save it
                   att.SaveAsFile ("c:\Users\kenh\desktop\podcasts\" & att.FileName)
                   iCount = iCount + 1
                 
               End If
             
           Next
         
        End If
        
    Next

    If iCount > 0 Then MsgBox "Saved " & iCount & " mp3 items"
    
End Sub

I have been using the new RSS feed feature in Outlook 2007 for some time now and absolutely love it - I'm in Outlook ALL day, it's the centre of my communication universe and having it collate my RSS feeds just makes sense.

I'm a regular listener to a few podcasts :

• Hanselminutes
• Dot Net Rocks
• The MicroISV Show

and until today TechNet Radio...

I have Outlook set to download enclosures automatically (so for the podcast shows I get the MP3 directly into my mailbox. Whilst this bloats my mailbox (as you'll see later) I work for an Email Archiving company (C2C) and my RSS feeds folder has an 'older than 21 days and is read' policy applied to it. We are also about to extend support for the RSS items making it even easier to identify them in a policy.

Anyway, today I got very annoyed with TechNet Radio. On looking at what I thought was new items in that feed I found that it was downloading all the feed items again (the same one's I already have). My status bar tells me that it's got 498MB to update  and it's going to take 8 hours.

On looking further I find that I already have 4 copies of most of this stuff...

So I go ahead and delete all the duplicates then examine the size of my 'Deleted Items' folder.

Almost 1.5GB

Okay, had enough ditch it all and delete the feed.

I mean, come on guys, what is going on - no one else gives me this hassle, the Pwop Productions guys (Hanselminutes and DotNetRocks) are fine, as is The MicroISV Show - never any errors or duplicates - and there MP3 have intelligent tags, like the name of the show and/or guest names instead of something like :

TechNet Radio - 21 December 2006

and their's is tagged with a Genre of Podcast not just left blank...

End of rant, end of my subscription to TechNet Radio.

This week (so far) has been good - in terms of completing things, productivity and new products.

First off, Microsoft finally released PowerShell for Vista. No more having to 'play' on my old lab machine to get to grips with this stuff. There seem to be a number of people reporting failed installs(due to EFS encryption being disabled), just read the comments of the PowerShell blog announcement.

Next, we're just coming to the final couple of days of a 'Supporting Exchange 2007, Office 2007 and Vista SPRINT' at work (we use a form of SCRUM as our development process) - all is looking good and we have beta sites lined up.

Then, I noticed Eileen's (the most communicative Microsoft employee on the planet) post about Office 2003 to Office 2007 command references. An interactive demo from Microsoft when you can click the toolbars and menus of an Office 2003 application and it tells you how to find the equivalent command/function in Office 2007. I spent some time finding the 10 or so commands I'd been having difficulty with and increased my productivity.
Here's her post : http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/31/old-to-new-reference-guides.aspx

Then late last night (again at work) we just completed our internal testing before sending our Archive One product for Microsoft Platform testing. We are testing against 5 of the 6 platform tests (we don't fit into the 'Managed Code' test category as we make extensive use of MAPI which basically requires C++ / Unmanaged code)

I always try to keep my Inbox at a manageable level (for me that is less than 50 items). Everything that I have dealt with (or I need for reference) I file in a specific reference folder

ASIDE: I know Getting Things Done, GTD, advocates just deleting it but I'm one of those guys that doesn't like to delete anything - I have no mailbox quota as we dogfood our own Archiving / Mailbox size control application, Archive One (shameless plugging).

Anyway, when the method I used for filing was to assign each email a category (or multiple categories) and then run an Outlook macro to copy it to a folder with the same name as the category. In Outlook 2003 assigning a category was a bit of a pain / lengthy process so I wrote a bunch of macros to automate this from the click of a single toolbar button.

Now I have Office 2007, assigning categories is much simpler, so I ditched the 'Assign Category XXX' macros and just wrote 'FileBasedOnCategory' macros. I needed one to process just the selected item and another for processing all items in my Inbox.

Now categorizing is a simple right click and select and storing a single toolbar button away...

 Here's the macros I wrote:

Public Const ReferenceFolder = "zz Reference"

Public Sub CategorizeThis()

    ' Assign a category to the selected objects
    Dim sCurrent As String, obj As Object, objList As Object
    
    Set objList = Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection
    
    For Each obj In objList
        
        StoreObject obj
    
    Next
    
    Set obj = Nothing
    Set objList = Nothing
    
End Sub


Public Sub CategorizeAll()

    ' Assign a category to the selected objects
    Dim sCurrent As String, obj As Object, objList As Object
    
    Set objList = Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items
    
    For Each obj In objList
        
        StoreObject obj
    
    Next
    
    Set obj = Nothing
    Set objList = Nothing
    
End Sub



Private Sub StoreObject(ByRef obj As Object)
    
    Dim vCat As Variant, aCats() As String, o As Object, sFolder As String, bOK As Boolean
    
    bOK = True
    
    If obj.Categories <> "" Then
    
        aCats = Split(obj.Categories, ",")
        For Each vCat In aCats()
        
            sFolder = ReferenceFolder & "\" & Trim(CStr(vCat))
            If CreateMAPIFolder(sFolder) Then
            
                Set o = obj.Copy
                o.Move GetMAPIFolder(sFolder)
                
            Else
            
                MsgBox ("Could not create folder : " & sFolder)
                bOK = False
                Exit For
                
            End If
            
        Next
        If bOK Then obj.Delete
        
    End If
    
End Sub


Private Function CreateMAPIFolder(ByVal sFolder As String) As Boolean

    ' Create a MAPIFolder object of the specified name if none exists
    Dim objNS As NameSpace, objParent As MAPIFolder, objChild As MAPIFolder
    Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    Set objParent = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
    
    Dim aFolders() As String, vFolder As Variant
    aFolders = Split(sFolder, "\")
    For Each vFolder In aFolders
        On Error Resume Next
        Set objChild = objParent.Folders(Trim(CStr(vFolder)))
        If Err Then Set objChild = objParent.Folders.Add(Trim(CStr(vFolder)))
        Err.Clear
        Set objParent = objChild
    Next
    If (InStr(objChild.FolderPath, sFolder) > 0) Then
        CreateMAPIFolder = True
    Else
        CreateMAPIFolder = False
    End If
    Set objParent = Nothing
    Set objChild = Nothing
    Set objNS = Nothing
    
End Function


Private Function GetMAPIFolder(ByVal FolderName As String) As Object

    ' Returns a MAPIFolder object of the specified name
    Dim objNS As NameSpace, objParent As MAPIFolder, objChild As MAPIFolder
    Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    Set objParent = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
    
    Dim aFolders() As String, vFolder As Variant
    aFolders = Split(FolderName, "\")
    For Each vFolder In aFolders
        Set objChild = objParent.Folders(CStr(vFolder))
        Set objParent = objChild
    Next
    Set GetMAPIFolder = objChild
    Set objParent = Nothing
    Set objChild = Nothing
    Set objNS = Nothing
    
End Function

I am/was a big fan of RSS Popper - when using Outlook 2003 it allowed me to pull blog posts into a selected folder in my mailbox (I used cached mode, so it was also available offline). It is currently at version 0.36 and has support for downloading enclosures (great for grabbing podcasts) and a neat feature where you can subscribe to blogs containing iCal's (and RSS Popper automagically creates meetings in your calendar for the iCal events - sounds really cool, nothing that I've ever used though).

Anyway, I've migrated my work laptop to Vista and Office 2007 and as Outlook 2007 has built in support for RSS feeds I've not installed RSS Popper. The RSS support in Outlook (apparently) based around the new Common Feed Store of Vista - this allows multiple apps to access / store your chosen RSS feeds, for example if I mark the post as 'Read' in IE7 then that fact is reflected when I look at it in Outlook RSS.

It's pretty simple to define new feeds - it's accessed from 'Tools -> Account Settings...' and is configured in much the same way as you configure an email account.

 Items are added to the defined folder as posts with any enclosures added as attachments to the post.

If you want to move ALL calendar items from an Outlook calendar in one mailbox to an Outlook calendar in another mailbox - it's not immediately apparent how to go about this.

You can simply copy it over giving it a new name (not Calendar) but then you end up with 2 calendars and it becomes messy. Also, you cannot delete the Calendar in the destination mailbox and copy the source one over (Outlook does not allow this)

So...

• Click on the Calendar folder
• From the 'View' menu choose 'Arrange By' , 'Current View' , 'By Category'

You should now end up with a table view of all your appointments...

• Click on the first item in the list
• Scroll down to the bottom of the list
• Hold down 'SHIFT' and click on the last item (NOTE: Select All (CTRL A) does not work)
• Drag all the selected items into the destination Calendar.