Exchange Server is Microsoft's flagship project. It is common for firms to choose Windows over other Operating Systems just so they can use Exchange Server. Most enterprise installations, especially those with remote or mobile employees, create custom collaborative Outlook and Exchange applications for groupware, salesforce automation and project management. Exchange & Outlook Programming is divided into four sections that build upon one another, first by establishing a base ("Why build collaborative solutions"?), then by laying out the tools that can be used to build collaborative solutions. The third section helps to establish how we should plan and design effective collaborative solutions. Finally, the fourth section provides insight and knowledge on the exact methods of using our tools to develop and rollout typical workflow/collaborative solutions.

Business has everything to do with collaboration, which is why it pays for organizations to devote resources to development of customized environments that are based on Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook. Taken together, say Joel Semeniuk and Duncan Mackenzie in Exchange & Outlook: Constructing Collaborative Solutions, these two flexible pieces of software can provide workers with all of the information they need to do their jobs effectively. Toward that end, this book presents a comprehensive look at Exchange and Outlook customization by using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and other Microsoft technologies. Read this one for ideas on what you can do with Outlook and recipes for getting the job done.

Code listings appear frequently in this book, but explanatory text is the main attraction. The authors' idea seems to be that if they tell you which system elements talk to which others, and how the communication takes place, you can write your own code to take advantage of the situation. To help you along, they include full statements on how they arrived at solutions for typical Exchange and Outlook problems, such as customizing the appearance of Web pages that are generated by Outlook Web Access (OWA). A reference to the Collaborative Data Objects (CDO) object model concludes this book and should prove helpful to programmers who are working on projects. --David Wall

Topics covered: Customizing Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Exchange 2000 by using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Component Object Model (COM) modules, and other programming techniques. In large part, this book is a survey of hooks, a look at the places where Outlook and Exchange allow customizations. There's detailed coverage of Outlook Web Access (OWA), forms development, Messaging API (MAPI), and the "digital dashboard" concept.