Find an entire conversation with Windows Desktop Search from Outlook's context menu.

My users love Windows Desktop Search (WDS). Find the stand alone version (the one without MSN Toolbar bundled) here.

Also, some of my users and I use Google's gmail as our personal email service. We've gotten used to the way gmail presents groups of messages a single "Conversation". If you're unfamiliar with gmail's conversation feature go see the turorial.

I set out to provide an easy way to accomplish the concept of conversations in Outlook. Outlook's built in functionality is to click on a message that you've replied to, then click on the information bar and select "Show related messages". However, you have to open each related message individually to view them (no preview pane).

I set out to add "Find Conversation" to the bottom of the context menu when you right click on an email. When clicked it would send a request to Windows Desktop Search resulting in a list of all emails in the requested conversation as well as a quick way to preview each email.

After hunting around the web and picking pieces of code from here and there (and adding a few lines of my own), I came up with a working solution. It's only been tested with Outlook 2003, but I can't see why it wouldn't work at least as far back as Outlook 2000 (don't quote me though).

Here's what the menu looks like.


Head over to Microsoft's Channel9 MSN Search wiki to get the code and step by step instructions on how to install. Mine is Answer #2.


Bonus Blog Info!!
There is one gotcha I've encountered with WDS, but it's a big one. Do NOT set up multiple WDS clients on your network to point to the same share on the server. It causes big problems. I tried to get some feedback on it in the newsgroups to no avail.

The Channel9 wiki is the only place I could find where WDS feature requests and bug reports might actually be heard. See my second attempt at explaining the problem here. And yet another attempt at explaining it can be found here (Gordon is part owner of BrightWire, a consultant I use to help solve particularly frustrating network problems).

Moral to the Bonus Blog Info? Don't index network drives!! The problem hasn't been solved (or even acknowleged as far as I can tell) yet.

Benchmark Plus is a small but successful financial firm with 7 employees in the west coast office, and 2 employees in our east coast office. About 1/5th of my job is as the administrator of our computer network (simply because I was the only one who semi understands this stuff). Three years ago I went to a Microsoft Big Day event here in Tacoma and was exposed to Small Business Server. After reading Harry Brelsford's "Small Business Server 2000: Best Practices" I purchased a Dell server and moved my small firm from a peer-to-peer network to the most cost effective full fledged client server environment available. We are currently on SBS 2003.

SBS has a thriving community of dedicated users. Most are consultants who do work for businesses like mine. This community publishes books, blogs & websites with a wealth of helpful information. They also participate in public newsgroups provided by Microsoft (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs) as well as Yahoo groups and other online forums. There's also public usergroups (I've been known to attend the one in Redmond from time to time).

One of the greatest warnings I've heard regarding SBS is DON'T HOST A PUBLIC WEBSITE ON SBS. There are numerous reasons why, which I won't go into here.

Heading this warning, my public and private websites are seperated like so:

In DNS, company.com points to the external server and remote.company.com points to our internal server. When running the CEICW, I put remote.company.com in the certificate configuration window, which creates the proper self signed security certificates. Remote Web Workplace works great if my users type http://remote.company.com/remote (it gets redirected to https). But I wanted it to be even easier. Users, in general, are lazy (throw me in this group!). Building solutions with this in mind is always best. So... now to the reason for this post! I wanted my users (when offsite) to simply type remote.company.com and get redirected to the secure RWW site. This is much easier for anyone to remember.

You can find my post SP1 trials with this problem via this newsgroup post.

The last response from Brandy Nee of Microsoft pointed me towards ISA settings, instead of the asp script I had been working on, and sent me searching. The solution ended up being extremely simple! I found an article on ISAServer.org, Redirecting OWA Users to the Correct Directories and Protocols.

After perusing the article there was one setting that I thought would help.
1) Open ISA Server Management.
2) Go to Firewall Policy's.
3) Go to the Properties of the "SBS RWW Web publishing Rule".
4) On the Paths tab, click the Add... Button.
5) In the text box enter /Remote\.
6) Under External Path, click 'The following folder' and enter /.
7) Click OK, OK, then Apply.

The entry should look like this:

Simple and effective. Now users type remote.company.com in their browser and get properly redirected to https://remote.company.com/remote.

Do you ever catch yourself sending an email message in Outlook and the second after you hit Send... "Damn it! I forgot to attach the file!"
Yeah, it used to happen to me pretty often too.

There are programs out there that charge to add attachment checking functionality to Outlook (by the way, I'm totally not against paying for a solution if I can't solve the problem myself), but here's a solution that I coded, and you can use it for free!

I threw together some vba code that catches an email before it goes out and asks if you meant to send an attachment. It checks for keywords (configurable by you) in the text of the Subject and Body.

Here's an email where I'm sending an attachment, BUT A FILE ISN'T ATTACHED.


And here's the warning I get when I stupidly hit Send.

Cool huh?

As a bonus, the code also checks for a blank Subject line.

To install in Outlook, click Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor and paste the code into the ThisOutlookSession module. You will also need to install a free dll called Redemption. See the comment on 8/23/2004 in the header of the code for more details.

To download the code, and for any help you might need, please visit the long running thread at OutlookCode.com.

Have fun with it.