Replicating Oracle Calendar In-tray Functions in Microsoft Outlook 2003

In this case a custom Search Folder works better than a Rule.

Users transitioning from legacy Oracle Calendar (formerly also known as CorporateTime) to Outlook 2003 often find Outlook lacks some features they have adopted into their messaging/collaboration workflow.  One of these is the Oracle Calendar In-tray which sorted calendar invitations and allowed users to manage invitations.

Since the user interface in Oracle Calendar maintains a sharp distinction between “calendar items” and all other “email,” the Outlook method of putting everything into the same Inbox causes consternation in a transitioning organization.  We have noticed the same thing to a smaller extent with some legacy Meeting Maker sites, though the larger market presence of Oracle makes this a bigger problem.

Our clients have requested we replicate this feature in Outlook.  In this article we’ll discuss the pros and cons of two approaches – rules vs. search folders.  We will describe the solution we developed which uses existing Outlook capability.

Rules are not always the best solution

We started with rules because we thought building a few rules that would move or copy calendar meeting requests and replies into folders would be the easiest approach.  This approach has some downsides.  The biggest problems are:

• Rules cause problems when Outlook is running in Cached Exchange Mode (KnowledgeBase article 870926 – see the section Practices to avoid when you use Outlook 2003 with Cached Exchange Mode) ;
• Rules can conflict easily with Event Sinks (e.g., for managing resources);
• Copying meeting items can create duplicate items that will get out-of-sync with the current calendar entries.

 We found another approach – search folders – that seem to address these deficiencies. In the following example, we’ll go through how to set up a single Search Folder which collects all meeting invitations and responses.

 Implementing the Search Folder

We managed to get this process to work in xxx steps:

The end result

Now all invitations and responses will be collected and filtered into this Folder, without being duplicated, and regardless of any processing that might have been done on them automatically by Event Sinks (e.g., Microsoft’s Auto-Accept Agent, or Sumatra’s Rhino).

You can get more sophisticated with these – including creating them under program control for more fine-tuned control and to directly match Oracle Calendar legacy capabilities, but this simple solution meets the requirements of the majority of users.

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