Outlook 2003 User Defined Contact Form

I've just gone through the Outlook custom forms learning curve. I'll include a few links that helped me to understand Outlook's very non-intuitive ways. I'll try to summarize...

BACKGROUND

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa155722(office.10).aspx

1. When you create a contact, Outlook assigns a message class to the item (in this case, each individual contact) based on the form that was used to create it. So, if you have old contacts that were created with the default form, the message class was set to IPM.Contact. This is the link between the item (contact) and the form that will appear when you open the contact to modify it.

2. Your custom form has a *different* message class than IPM.Contact. Outlook create a new message class for your custom contact form by appending the form name to the base class. For example, if your custom contact form is name MyForm, then Outlook creates the message class IPM.Contact.MyForm. If you create a new contact using this custom form, that contact will have this new message class assigned to it.

THE PROBLEM

The effect of assigning a message class to each individual item (contact) is that existing contacts open with the old default form they were created with, and new contacts created with the custom form will open in the custom form they were created with. Talk about confusing. Some contacts open with the old form, some with a new form. If you have several custom forms and create new contacts with them, you may have contacts open up in myriad forms.

I assume that Outlook does this to maintain consistency between the form and it's data.

THE SOLUTION

What you really need to do is change the message class of your old contacts to the message class of your new, custom form.

Of course, Outlook lacks essential utilities to do such basic things as this, so you'll have to turn to third party tools to do this (unless you want to learn enough VBA program the solution yourself).

Microsoft did have a utility (Outlook FormsAdmin) to do this for Outlook 2000, but not for later versions. Instead of updating the utility to work with later versions, M$ came up with some crazy workaround. While the workaround it's that difficult, it's silly to have to do this. Microsoft should update the utility. Here's the Microsoft solution:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241235

I knew that I could use VBA to write a program to change the message class of items in a folder. Here's a knowledge base article with sample VBA code showing how to do it:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/201087

However, who wants to spend time messing around with writing code for this feature? Someone out there has already done this before. So, where are these utilities?

http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?ID=39

This site is a wealth of information on Outlook. On the "Convert Existing Items" section of this page you'll find a list of ready-made tools that will help you change the message class of contact items -- this is exactly what we want.

I just went down the list and tried tools until I found one that works. The first one, ContactGenie Message Class Modifier, seems to be a feature-rich tool. It lives as a add-in in Outlook, or can be run standalone. However, for all it's features, I couldn't get it to work properly with Outlook 2003. The add-in would just disappear when selecting the folder to convert.

I tried the 2nd utility, DocMessageClass, which is a very simple utility that will convert all the items in the selected folder to the same message class. While it didn't have some of the selective update features of the ContactGenie utility, it did work.

With this utility I was able to easily convert all my contacts to use my new custom form. Now, when I click on a contact, it opens in my new custom form.

I've also set the properties of my contact folder to use my custom form when posting (creating) a new contact. So, from now on new contacts will also be created with, and opened with my custom form.

What I've figured out as a custom forms best practice is to separate different custom forms into different contact folder. Outlook will allow me to use more than one custom form in the same folder. However, using multiple forms in the same folder can create much confusion when opening up various items as each item could open with a different form--the one it was created with--unless I start modifying the message classes of the items.

Unfortunately, I can't view contacts in different forms as easily as I could if the information were in Access. I guess Outlook figured it's ability to configure different *views* was sufficient satisfy most users. I find the problem is that the contact form is the primary way that most people look at contact data, and that form is just plain ugly. It really screams for customization.

So there you go. I hope this solves your problems, meets your needs, and helps some others along the way.

JR