How to link to Outlook items

[xja]

Here's a tip to anyone who wants to create Info Items in UR that link to any Outlook item... email, tasks, contacts, events, etc. It's not quite drag and drop and it's not synchronization but might be useful for some.

Outlook provides a way to link to any Outlook item using a URL

It can be "path based" like this:
eg,
Outlook:\\Personal Folders\Inbox\~EmailSubject
Outlook:\\Personal Folders\Contacts\~John Doe

or you can link to a globally unique identifier (GUID) that is created for an item and doesn't change when you rename or move it:
eg,
Outlook:000000000EAE44930B6999468AC478B81C0B1FA704 022000

It is best to use the GUID URL since you don't have to worry about changes breaking the link. To capture the GUID, you need a little free program called Outlook Linker:

https://kinook.com/Download/LinkerForWindowsSetup.exe

With this you can capture the GUID URL with a click.

In UR, you can edit the Task or Contact template to include a URL attribute or copy the Document template and make it into a template for Outlook email, notes, event, task or contact (probably better to create new templates). Don't store contents or synchronize.

You can then create a new Info Item based on one of these templates, paste the Outlook GUID URL into the URL attribute, and you can access the linked Outlook item as you would any UR linked item.

Of course, since it is not synchronized, the initial title/subject/name of the item (and any subsequent changes made to the item in Outlook) will have to be entered manually in UR.

Since Outlook synchronization in UR sounds unlikely in the near future, it would be cool if Kinook could define a simple text markup format (perhaps an XML format) so that one could paste in text in that XML format and have it recognized as an Info Item, with Attributes (including URL, Template Item, Icon, From, To, First Name, Last Name, etc.) and their values specified in the XML. I could then easily write an Outlook VBA macro that could be used to capture the GUID and key fields from an Outlook item and put them into the Windows clipboard in the appropriate XML format, so I could just paste a linked Info Item into UR. Any chance of that???

Drag and drop would be nicer but I suspect that the GUID is not contained in the drag and drop content.