Mail from Outlook to Domino Web application without installing Lotus Notes

Working with some of the best-designed software and hardware stuff, we usually come across issues that compel us to go deep down to the root of the cause and help us in exploring the software from a better perspective. One such issue worth-sharing is to fetch mails from Outlook to a Domino CRM web application without installing Notes client. Yes, you read it right, without installing Notes.

For those who feel Microsoft’s plug-in (Outlook Connector for Domino) can solve the issue, I must tell you, that Outlook Connector for Domino requires Lotus Notes client installation. Even IBM’s plug-in (Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook) is unable to display the Domino Directory with Outlook XP, Outlook 97 or Outlook 2003. However, the great functionality of Domino allows it to setup any NSF as the receiver of mails. This way, if you tag mail with the values inside Outlook, an agent could process the forwarded mails (add Readers/Authors field as per customer id etc).

If you start looking at POP3 Gmail account within Outlook and go through its writable properties of mail-object you will realize that the mail object has a property called Category. This field in Notes is termed as Keywords and it seems to be restricted to ASCII characters (or Gmail/Domino converts it to that) and therefore the values needs to be URL-encoded. This will assure you that everything from line break, international characters etc work smoothly. Now to get mails from Outlook to Domino Web application you can perform the following steps:

1. Send the values in URL parameter pattern, as they’re more readable (through formats like XML, CSV and JSON works fine). The only restriction is the 32k limit on fields.
2. To allow a user to select the customer ID, use the Web Browser control inside a dialog in Outlook. User interface looks similar to DHTML code.
3. When user clicks a table row, add a class on the row so that the user sees which customer is selected.
4. Collect all the values from selected table row and put them inside a hidden field (separated with comma).
5. When the user clicks OK in Outlook dialog, use VBA for collecting the values from the hidden field. Use the second dialog for some custom fields such as document type, date and description.

This way you don’t need to install Lotus Notes but will get mails from Outlook to Domino web application.

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