Outlook 2000: Public Forms ? 1

[ChrisCalvert]

I am looking for a way for a group of about 100 people to submit requests to a central account. I was thinking of a 'public form' or 'public stationary' that would have the
form set up, with appropriate blanks. I would like to know if Outlook has anything like this. If anyone has a better solution, I would be up for ideas.....

 

[cthaxter]

What are you trying to accomplish, exactly? What kinds of requests do you want to handle?

If you have Outlook set up to connect to Exchange Server, then yes, it's possible to set up public forms, whether it be contact-based, or calendar-based, etc.

Do you know any VBScript? If you don't, then it'll be difficult to set up a form with any kind of functionality beyond simple data entry.

-Christopher

 

[ChrisCalvert]

All that I want to do is to have every user in this area be able to submit schedule corrections to our workforce management officer. Just looking for an easy way to have a form with blanks that say something like:

Time out of adherence:
Reason for Exception:

I would like this exact same form to be usable by every user. Just click and it comes up (as an email, almost like stationary) with these blanks and labels, and if it is easy to do, also with the workforce managers email already in the 'to'.
I am pretty sure this is fairly simple. I just don't really know much of anything about Outlook. I do know some VB, but am still quite a neophyte.

 

[cthaxter]

There may be a number of possibilities. Two that come to mind are using stationery, and using public forms. If you want to use the data received and do fancy automated things with it, by dumping the data directly into a database, then public forms would be the way to go, short of creating a javascript-enabled webpage that uses PHP or something on the server side. The other, easier solution is simply to create a stationery file on your network server drive, and have all your employees set their Outlook to point to it whenever they need it.

Create the stationery in Word, however you want the form to be. Save it on the network drive.

Then, in everybody's Outlook, go to Tools/Options/Mail Format/Send in this message format: HTML, and then click on Stationery Picker and navigate until you've selected your Word document as your stationery. Be sure to leave the default stationery as None. Then, whenever they want to use it, they need to 1) make sure their mail format is still HTML and 2) go to Actions/New mail message using/More Stationery and then choose the appropriate stationery.

That can also be automated with the help of VBA, where all they would have to do is click on a button to bring up the stationery. I would have to investigate as to how to do that. The Tek-Tips VBA forum may be better suited for that type of question.

-Christopher

 

[ChrisCalvert]

Thanks, that sounds like the easiest way to do it. I was pretty sure stationary sounded good, but I was not clear on the specifics.