Pulling a Outlook profile from a user

[williamsba]

Here is what I am trying to do. I have a powerpoint slideshow that everyone in our company needs to view. I will send out the link through Outlook to this slideshow to all of the employees. After they scroll through all of the slides I would like a page to pull their outlook profile and shoot it off in a form to a certain email address. The info we want to get is in their properties, general tab. That way we know exactly who has and who hasnt viewed the slide show. We want it to pull the information so that employees cant enter someone elses info in there without them reading the slide show.

Does anyone out there know of a way to do this? If I can figure out how to pull out one of the fields from the properties I will be able to figure out how to pull the rest of them out as well.

Also if you have any other ideas of how to guarantee that a certain person has viewed the slide show without just entering in false information.

Any input will be greatly appreciated, thank you... Brad Williams
Webmaster
2d Force Service Support Group
United States Marine Corps

 

[rycamor]

There is no way to *absolutely* guarantee that the required people have seen your slideshow, because there are always human factors beyond your control, such as someone using someone else's computer. There are several ways to track user access, though. I don't know about getting the Outlook profile from users, but maybe someone here know how to do that. Also, all someone has to do to spoof that process is change their Outlook profile temporarily.

1. If the slideshow is residing on your webserver, simply track the IP addresses of the viewers to that page, using ASP, Perl, PHP or whatever server-side language is on your server. (This is assuming the IP addresses are not dynamically generated by DHCP, and that someone has a list of who has what IP)

2. When you send out each email, you can append an unique ID to each hyperlink as part of the query string, for example

http://yourserver.mil/slideshowdir/slideshow.html?id=432134,

then just have the server track the 'id' variable. You can easily code the server to prevent access to anyone who tries to take off the query string, or mess with it. (I recommend this method the most)

3. For an extremely low-tech way to do it, you can have a button to finish the slideshow, which uses a 'lite' html form which doesn't submit anything to the server but simply sends an email to you with the user's default email client.(Outlook, in your case). I can't remember the exact syntax, but it's something like <FORM ACTION=&quot;mailto:yourname@yourserver.mil&quot;> However, depending on the settings of your users' computers, they might be prompted by outlook as to whether to allow the email to be sent.

 

[bigfoot]

The mailto tag will only bring up an email form to fill out.