Developers can use Microsoft Outlook 2000 to write powerful, customized mail-enabled and collaborative applications. Professional Outlook 2000 Programming surveys the available options on this platform, employing a hands-on guide to writing custom modules using a variety of APIs and techniques. Featuring a simple presentation style, this book compiles some essential material. The text will be understandable to anyone with a little VB/VBA programming experience.

By exposing COM objects to VBScript or VBA, developers can create custom Outlook forms and applications. Naturally, the text shows off this programming approach with a full tour of how to get up and running with the development environment, how to create custom forms, and then how to deploy (or publish) them. In addition to providing clear examples, the book points out gotchas (and even known bugs) you'll encounter.

The book doesn't stop there. You'll find out how to make Outlook work with other Microsoft Office tools (like Word, Excel, and Access) using OLE Automation and data sharing with ADO. Other sections demonstrate the use of Collaborative Data Objects (CDO), a simple set of COM objects for enabling e-mail within custom applications.

The best part of Professional Outlook 2000 Programming has to be its meaty case studies--which include an asset-tracking application that uses e-mail forms to track computer hardware for an organization, plus a nicely functional billing application. A third case study--for a customer-service application--reveals how to combine CDO with basic Active Server Pages (ASPs). After reading this book, Outlook programmers will be able to take their skills to the Web. Microsoft has added new options to Outlook 2000, and this text will help you keep up with current listings of all classes and methods. --Richard Dragan

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Outlook is the primary mailing application for millions of users. Using VBA and VB, you can create custom email applications to suit your coorporate or individual needs. As the world embraces email, there is more and more unstructured data moving around. The power of Outlook to run custom applications which manipulate and manage this data is just being realized. This book provides a deep exploration into what's possible with Outlook 2000.