Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, Second Edition (DV-MPS Programming)

Before you can develop applications in the Microsoft Outlook 98 and Microsoft Outlook 2000 environments, you must understand a few core features of the Outlook client. Any custom Outlook application you develop will leverage these built-in features. For example, if you customize the Contact form in Outlook, your application will automatically inherit drag-and-drop functionality, telephony integration, and journaling. This chapter describes some of the built-in features of Outlook that your applications can take advantage of. In later chapters, we'll use what we learned here to extend Outlook functionality.

Outlook's feature set can be divided into two distinct categories: e-mail and information management. The features of these two categories will be the basis for your collaborative applications. Microsoft Outlook 2000 enhances the functionality even more by providing additional features as well as an expanded object model that you can develop with. The features of Microsoft Outlook 2000 are described in Chapter 9.