Customer Reviews

Building MS Outlook 97 Applications

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My company just moved to Outlook 97 and we have just started using it for some of our groupware needs. The book provides good coverage of VB scripting that is required to fully manipulate the forms in Outlook. I am an intermediate level Access 97 programmer (no experience making client/server apps, just stand-alone apps) and the book seemed to be targeted just to my level. It helped me create some useful applications, such as a threaded discussion group (the first example) within 30 minutes!!! I am not done reading it, but I look forward to the examples at the end that incorporate/link Access 97 to Outlook 97 to automate tracking of responses to the applications that I will be making soon. This book is great because most other books that cover Outlook don't discuss handling of forms or VB scripting. This book does a nice job on this subject from a beginner's perspective.

This book claims to help the reader "use Outlook Forms to build groupware solutions - fast!" Unfortunately the author speeds through topics in a fairly unrelated manner, showing the applications on the accompanying CD in just enough detail to show what one could do with Outlook if one had the knowledge. This is where the book falls apart. The knowledge is not presented coherently. One or two well designed applications, taken completely through would be much better than the large set described shallowly. I felt as if I were on a 21 city tour though Europe in three days.