How to make Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange work together seamlessly

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APPLICATION INTERCHANGE
How to make Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange work together seamlessly
By John J. Coolidge

Do you use Microsoft Exchange/Outlook for mail, and Lotus Domino/Notes for applications? Does the Exchange Administrator frown on using Lotus Notes Mail to send to Exchange? I've always felt limited in my Lotus Notes application development by not having the ability to fully utilize mail and calendar capabilities from a Lotus Notes application, using Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. This frustration prompted me to figure out how to institute this capability. After some experimentation, I discovered that you can create Outlook Mail Messages, Calendar Entries, Tasks, and Contacts, as well as include doclinks and data in Outlook applications, all directly from Lotus Notes. This can be done in the back end or the front end, all by pushing a button.

Caveats
This will work with Outlook 98 and 2000 only. I've tested it only in Lotus Notes versions R4.64 through R5.02. For the doclinks to work, you must have the file extension .ndl associated to Lotus Notes. (This usually is done on install, but it's safer to check first.)

To check for .ndl and the Lotus Notes association, open Windows Explorer and select View->Options/Folder->options (in Windows 98) and look for the .ndl file type. If it's there you can skip the next section. If not, select the File Types tab, and then select New Type. Enter the following information in the appropriate spaces:


Description   -????suggestion (or what ever else you prefer)

Associated Extension - .ndl

Select New.

In Action, enter the action that you want to define (such as Open or Print).

In Application used to perform action, enter the command that you want to complete this action.

Select OK.

Once you've finished setting the .ndl file type, you can start connecting Lotus Notes and Outlook.

At first, this took a lot of fumbling around in many different Microsoft help programs. One problem I was having was getting anything else besides a mail memo to be created no matter what object I called. I was calling the object by a constant name.


Set myItem = 

myOlApp.CreateItem(olMailItem)

So after about three days of searching through the Outlook Automation Help, the VB Objects Browser, and the Microsoft Web site, I finally found a chart of constants and the numeric equivalents for the objects, and was able to come up with this syntax:


Set myItem = myOlApp.CreateItem(0)

Once I used these numeric constants, the rest fell into place. A copy of this chart is on the help-using document of the sample application for which I've provided a link at the end of this article.