Outlook Appointments from MV

I have code that updates the Outlook Calendar from MV apps. I decided to hook it up with DesignBais. This is just too cool.

I won’t bother to write too much on this. The images tell the story. I had to scrunch up the images to fit on this page. Click the links to launch the images into a separate page.

This first image shows a DesignBais form in development. Test mode is turned on so I can see how it works. Note the text and selections. From creating the server-side file and dict / field references, to creating the DesignBais form and supporting code, only a couple hours was spent on this and most of that was in some trivial fine tuning.

On clicking submit, before my eyes the Outlook calendar is updated.

Opening the appointment we see the same data entered in the form.

So How Cool is that?!

I wrote the code to update the Outlook calendar for a client who needs to create appointments in Exchange Server from an app based on Universe. The connectivity pipe to do that is mv.NET. I didn’t have to write any code at all for the server, it’s all in .NET. So with no code changes at all, I use this code with D3, QM, jBASE, and other environments. My client has Exchange Server and shared calendars, I use a local PST file. The code handles all of these.

Their user interface is actually an ASP.NET website that we’re building for their sales team. I just did the DesignBais front-end because it was fast and easy. The UI to gather data doesn’t matter – once the data is put into the MV environment it immediately gets pulled into the calendar. To extrapolate a little, this doesn’t just pull calendar entries into Outlook. We can pull SQL queries into Oracle, MySQL, or SQL Server, we can make requests of Web Services, we can get the MV application to do all sorts of things. Stay tuned. You’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing in coming months.