Viewing Journal Items

Attached is a PST for the two forms that will allow workgroups to see all the journal items made for a contact, not just the journal items of the current user as they now have it.

Several have expressed a need for this kind of functionality, saying that they want to know about the journaled items made by all the users for a given contact. Outrage, even, has been expressed that this capability was not included by MS.

I claim that this capability is included in Outlook--it is the incorrect setup of the organizational e-mail collection system that is in error. Note, we are talking about multiple users looking at the same contact. This implies a public contacts folder and the use of an Exchange Server. It is the incorrect conception of how email should be used in a business WorkGroup that is causing the problem.

Let us consider the pure business WorkGroup, in which there is no private e-mail. In this case, one would define only one profile for the workgroup as a public profile. It would contain the usual 9 default folders, Calendar, Contacts, Deleted Items, Inbox, Journal, Notes, Outbox, Sent Items and Tasks. All email for all people in the workgroup comes to the common Inbox. All contacts are made in the one contact folder, and all journal items go to the one Journal folder. When one goes to the Journal page of a contactitem, all the journal items for that contact, made by all the workers in the WorkGroup, are displayed. (This is speculation, as I do not have an Exchange Server to test this with. One of you interested parties should test this.) This is the capability you all want.

How does the problem arise. Well, it comes about because everybody has a mind set that every worker should have a private email box. Nobody wants others to see their private email, and nobody wants to wade through others' email to get to their own. The private, or semi-private in the case of a workers, emailbox is a concept that is the primary property of the Internet and nets in general. Consequently, the private mailboxes are set up first, and then users try to set up "public" contact folders to share their contacts among the WorkGroup members, but alas, the journalitems that each worker creates is stored in the journal folder of their email service personal folder set. Hence the problem.

The solution is to make sure:

1) that the "public" contact folder is a contact folder in a mail service profile on the exchange server;

2) and WorkGroup members access the contactitems in the public contact folder by logging on to the public mail service profile. Any journal items that they create, will automatically go to the common, public, Journal folder, and will be properly displayed on the contact's journal page.

3) Mail rules are used to distribute email to individual Inboxes.

Now, I may be merely whistling "Dixi" about what can be done with Exchange Server, but that method should be tried first, before trying the custom folders/custom forms features of this App.

Link to Custom.PST

Hollis D. Paul [hdp@compuserve.com]