Linking Outlook items to Contacts - multiple, faster or automatically?

  • Thread starter Thread starter mensan
  • Start date Start date
M

mensan

Hi,

My business is a financial brokerage. Most of my business email are
to and from my provider companies. The subject lines of these emails
are client names and account numbers. I've seen the beauty of the
Activities tab of the Outlook 2003 contacts, but my biggest pain in
Outlook is that it takes too many clicks to link Outlook items to the
Outlook contact of my clients. Also, I'm doing it one by one.

OK, here comes Business Contact Manager and its 'Link to History'
toolbar. The trouble is, 'Link to History' still takes the same
amount of clicks as the previous method. Also, I still have to do it
one by one.

Do you guys know an easier way? Also, is there an add-in or macro
that will automatically link items to contacts based on their subject
lines, or perhaps suggest such links?

Regards,

mensan
 
Business Tools | Link E-mail. You can link all existing mail items and set
up automatic email linking from that menu.
 
Thank you Susan for the reply but you may have misunderstood the
question.
Business Tools | Link E-mail. You can link all existing mail items and set
up automatic email linking from that menu.
Click to expand...

All this does is associate email sent to and received from this
Business Contact. Yes, it's faster than the Activities tab, but
AFAICS it's worse! It won't index existing notes, journals, tasks or
appointments.

Here's my question again:

For example, I want emails with the subject "Re: Sue Mosher 10293952"
linked to my client with that name. Do I have to do it one by one?

Regards,

mensan
 
My name isn't Susan.

Your original message implied that you had not discovered that it is
unnecessary to use Link to History to link email messages individually. I
wanted to make sure that you knew that BCM has a feature that does all the
linking automatically. Rereading your original message, however, I see that
the emails you are concerned about are not from the BCM accounts or contacts
themselves, but from intermediary companies, so some manual linking would be
necessary.

Your original message didn't say anything about any need to link other types
of items (which BCM cannot do after the fact, alas, only when you initially
create the item).

If the account name or number in the subject line is unique and the account
already exists in a particular Outlook contacts folder (and you know which
folder that is), it would be possible to write Outlook VBA code to do the
following:

1) Automatically process incoming messages (see
http://www.outlookcode.com/d/code/zaphtml.htm for a couple of different
approaches)

2) Parse the subject to extract the name or number (using standard text
parsing functions such as Instr(), Left() and Mid()) -- hopefully there's a
standard pattern; if not, this gets complex.

3) Look up the item by name or number using Outlook's MAPIFolder.Items.Find
method

4) Link the message to the contact by using the MailItem.Links.Add method.

5) Save the message. (MailItem.Save)

Also, if you want to explore existing tools, there are dozens of other
contact relationship management tools for Outlook -- see
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/contacts.htm .

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers



mensan said:
Thank you Susan for the reply but you may have misunderstood the
question.
Business Tools | Link E-mail. You can link all existing mail items and set
up automatic email linking from that menu.
Click to expand...

All this does is associate email sent to and received from this
Business Contact. Yes, it's faster than the Activities tab, but
AFAICS it's worse! It won't index existing notes, journals, tasks or
appointments.

Here's my question again:

For example, I want emails with the subject "Re: Sue Mosher 10293952"
linked to my client with that name. Do I have to do it one by one?

Regards,

mensan


"Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]" <[email protected]> wrote in message
Business Tools | Link E-mail. You can link all existing mail items and set
up automatic email linking from that menu.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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