Advice

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Guest

Hi,
I need to send some files weekly (generated by another program) to some of
our customers. I was thinking of writing a program to do just that, however,
wouldn't be better to create an addin for outlook so the user can basically
see a list of the customers being emailed and click a button (SEND MAIL) and
use outlook to do so?

Where can I find info on this?

Thanks......Happy New Year!
 
Chris said:
Hi,
I need to send some files weekly (generated by another program) to some of
our customers. I was thinking of writing a program to do just that,
however,
wouldn't be better to create an addin for outlook so the user can
basically
see a list of the customers being emailed and click a button (SEND MAIL)
and
use outlook to do so?

Where can I find info on this?
Click to expand...



Hope your user never goes on vacation, because if he or she wasn't there,
the e-mail would not get sent.

I would support the notion that you retain a copy of the outbound mail in an
interface, allowing the sending company to keep a log of the messages sent.
Since most messages will be the same, you can optimize this quite a bit so
that you are only saving the differences between the mail messages. There
is not a lot of value in having that interface tied to Outlook. (nothing
wrong with it, but no value in it either). If you do decide to create a
plug-in using the Outlook Object Model, then make sure that many users in
the company can install the plug in and can see the same cache of messages.
Otherwise, vacation is still a problem.

Use search.msn.com to find "Outlook Object Model" or download the Outlook
SDK to get more info.

--
--- Nick Malik [Microsoft]
MCSD, CFPS, Certified Scrummaster
http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this forum are my own, and not
representative of my employer.
I do not answer questions on behalf of my employer. I'm just a
programmer helping programmers.
--
 
The reason I was shooting for Outlook is our email server only allows outlook
connections to send emails.
 
If your e-mail server is Exchange, you can work with your company's system
admin to enable SMTP from a specific server, thereby allowing outbound mail
to be sent without having to come from Outlook.

You can also install a seperate SMTP server and run outbound mail from it,
without it coming from Exchange. Both require the assistance of your IT
staff, but will give you the ability to produce a sensible application (and
thus save the company tens of thousands of costs over the life of the
product. Gartner estimates that the cost of ongoing maintenance for an app
plus the cost of monitoring and eventual decomissioning to be 28 cents of
every dollar spent on development (including the fully loaded employee costs
for the employees who write it). Therefore, doing the app correctly (so
that you don't have to do it again) is easily worth a little hassle when it
comes to networking.

You can also get COTS packages that do a fine job of handling outbound
e-mail, including the CRM module in Microsoft Dynamics. It's usually less
expensive to purchase functionality than to write it from scratch.

--
--- Nick Malik [Microsoft]
MCSD, CFPS, Certified Scrummaster
http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this forum are my own, and not
representative of my employer.
I do not answer questions on behalf of my employer. I'm just a
programmer helping programmers.
 
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