As the newest member of the Axosoft Team, I've spent quite a good deal of time getting acquainted with the OnTime Product Suite. I've come to find that I'm totally digging the OnTime SDK, and I thought that one of my first OnTime SDK projects should be something that everyone's been asking for ... so, I hope I've accomplished at least one of my goals for the day.
I know, everyone loves their screenshots, so I won't hold you up from your eye-candy;
Tasks in OnTime, how ... Normal!
Tasks from OnTime ... in Outlook?!
And again, just cause it's so cool ...
A Task from OnTime, in a customized Outlook Task Form
A Custom Form Region in an Outlook 2007 Task Form, with a Lady Bug Icon!
Editing the Outlook version of the Task ... wonder what happens to the OnTime version?
Oh, nice ... thats convenient!
NOTE: The items in Outlook are 'tagged' with a custom User Property, the only thing this sample relies on to match an OnTime Task to an Outlook Task is this custom property which stores the OnTime TaskId. This means you can literally changed anything, and as long as you account for it in the 'behind the scenes' code, it'll update -- including the Subject/Name of the task itself!
What if I edit it in OnTime though?
Hey ... that's actually pretty cool!
Now that the eye candies over, and I've got your attention ... I wanted to tell you about my cool Geek Marketing idea ...
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Since I can't officially make contributions to the contest, I figured I'd toss an idea in a blog post and mask it under the guise of a really cool thing you can do with the OnTime SDK, complete with Photoshoped screenshots and all.
So ... my idea is ...
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Err, ok ... ok, already... you got me ... the screenshots are REAL! For the impatient, you can jump right to the download link, and for those who like to read the nitty gritty details ...
Requirements:
- Visual Studio 2005
- Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Second Edition
- Outlook 2007
- OnTime Client
- OnTime SDK
Time Invested: 12 work hours (8 hours research, 4 hours code)
I'd also like to note that my knowledge of the OnTime SDK prior to starting this was limited, and my knowledge of VSTO was completely nil -- I spent a good day researching the possibilities and experimenting with different ways to modify Outlook, and the following day I came in and wrote this example (got it done before lunch!)
The Basics:
First, we create a new Outlook 2007 Addin Project with VSTO 2005 SE, and then we add a Web Reference to the OnTime SDK Task Service. We create a custom Form Region in Outlook 2007 and save it to Disk, add the Form Region to our projects Resources, and then write the wrapper code that loads the Form Region for OnTime Tasks in Outlook. We also write some simple 'get all tasks, compare them to current outlook tasks, create or update as necessary' code, and viola ... we're done.
Ok ... sorry, I know thats not as detailed as some people would like it to be, but the amount of code and steps involved in creating an Outlook 2007 Addin is a bit beyond the scope of a single Blog post, so you'll just have to download the Sample Code and check it out.
For those of you who may have specific questions about this sample, please feel free to post them in the following forum thread.