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.

[srdiamond]

This may be the most important information I have ever seen about Outlook.

What happens if you try to store contents? Since a Word document can be stored internally, and Outlook uses Word as its editor, I would have thought messages from Outlook could be stored.

[xja]

Originally posted by srdiamond
What happens if you try to store contents? Since a Word document can be stored internally, and Outlook uses Word as its editor, I would have thought messages from Outlook could be stored.

If you try to Store Contents, it doesn't bring in the contents and it then (usually) is unable to open the linked item either (don't know why).

The link just works like a shortcut in Explorer (tells Outlook to open that item) than like a web URL where the built-in browser can capture the contents.

You CAN store any Outlook item internally by dragging and dropping into UR, however, UR only recognizes the .msg file for email messages and not other Outlook items. If you try it with an Outlook contact, it will copy into UR, but it will treat it like an email message. Try it. Of course, these will be copies and will not be linked to the original. If there is no GUID in the drag and drop content, it would be impossible to create a link just from that info alone. In theory, maybe you could create an event sink for Outlook to catch a drag event...

You can drag an Outlook item in such as an email, task, etc. and change the URL to Outlook GUID so you have the body/notes section of the item in UR (and so it is indexed) and you can press Ctrl-Shift-J to open the linked item in Outlook. You won't be able to open, edit or update the stored contents (ie, using Ctrl-J) though. And any edits to the linked item won't be indexed for searching.

Another problem is that you still have to duplicate some edits (ie, edit title and/or delete item in both UR and Outlook), but you can just edit the contents in Outlook. The contents will not be indexed though.

Well, it's not as convenient and useful as synchronization but it can come in handy if you want to leave data in Outlook and still creates links to it in UR. For instance, I need to have my Contacts and Tasks in Outlook so they can be synchronized to my Palm.