Meetings between Notes and Outlook users - guru help needed (?Alan Lepofsky)

For a long time I have battled to understand how Outlook treats Notes invitations (especially Outlook 2003). I think I finally know “what” it is doing, but now I need to work around its “features”.

Case 1 - from Native Notes, send a meeting invitation to an Outlook user. Outlook gets an email (shows in Inbox as mail), with .ics attachment as well as a .html attachment. .html has a copy of the body field content of the Notes form. To activate the .ics, they have to click on it, then say “OK” to Windows pop-up security message, finally they get the choice to accept, reject etc.

Case 2 - from my application (grafted onto Native Notes mail template). I get the same effect - two attachments, and Outlook user has to click 3 times to get to the invite.

BUT …

Case 3 - from the same application, if the sender has attached anything, then Outlook sees it as Calendar item in the Inbox, and when you open it, you are in - you can accept, reject etc.

BUT …

Case 4 - This doesn’t happen in Native Notes - invites with extra attachments still show up as email and require the 3 clicks.

I think this has something to do with a “feature” of Exchange that I found in an earlier post here …

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/5d392ffff0675ebe8525710000674127?OpenDocument&Highlight=0,outlook,calendar,attachment

From what he is saying, Exchange looks for attachments and when it finds one it does something clever. So the fact that I’m attaching a file seems to trigger it off.

But I need to have this effect in Outlook all the time.

Any ideas?

Subject: Meetings between Notes and Outlook users - guru help needed (?Alan Lepofsky)

Ummm… modify the notes email template to always include a 1 pixel.gif image that is just 1kb, and insert it conditionally if the form type is a meeting invite…

If you are allowed ot mod the email template this is a 5 minute job for a competent Notes developer…

Use computed subform…if regular memo then insert nothing, otherwise insert subform containing the teeny tiny attachment…

Then I’d just leave exchange alone… probably easier ot mod the notes side…

If you fiddle with exchange you might get regressive bugs with exchange to exchange invites etc., …

Subject: RE: Meetings between Notes and Outlook users - guru help needed (?Alan Lepofsky)

Unfortunately, adding an attachment programatically doesn’t produce the effect we are looking for - for some reason, Domino doesn’t produce the desired effect.

Remember that the addition of the .html and .ics attachments is a function that Domino does at the last moment, when routing the email. I don’t know of any way to intervene in that.