Exchange & Outlook®: Constructing Collaborative Solutions

Chapter 8. Visual Basic, CDO, and MAPI

Microsoft Outlook is the primary client for any Exchange-based solution, but sometimes it cannot meet your collaborative development needs. In such a situation, you either need to build an alternative application to work within your solution or create additional components to add to Outlook's functionality.

Now, before I go any further into discussing alternatives to developing in Outlook, let me make one thing clear: You can do almost anything in Outlook! Often, we turn to an alternative tool (like Visual Basic, which will be the focus of this chapter) not because we cannot do it in Outlook, but because it is easier or more convenient to build within the other tool.

Outside of Outlook, the key tool for ...