March 12, 2010 in Tips by Nick Sivridis

Tip: Hyperlink shortcuts in Outlook 2007

After reading some user reports about not being able to add Jello Dashboard as a homepage to Outlook installations working in MS Exchange environment, I’ve decided to find a workaround using the shortcuts collection of Outlook.

The main idea was to create a shortcut for the Jello Dashboard main file, into Outlook, so that there would be an alternative to homepage folders. Outlook 2000 implements this well, since you can go to File>New and select Create a shortcut for a web page.

But things changed since then, and new versions of Outlook have strict security rules for these types of things. Though my main idea failed to be fully implemented, I thought it would be good to share the line of code which will help you create a shortcut to any web page, just like the one Microsoft added there  (the default Microsoft Office online) but gave us no way to add our own web page shortcuts except for renaming and removing them!

• To be able to enter code directly into Outlook, open the code editor using the Tools>Macro>Visual Basic Editor or Alt+F11.
• Show the immediate window by selecting View>Immediate window or Ctrl+G
• Enter the code into the immediate window and press enter:

outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add “URL”,”Shortcut name”,1

The code will execute after pressing enter and the shortcut will be saved into your Shortcuts section. You can rename or reorder and add to groups later like any standard Outlook folder shortcut.

For the URL, you can enter any web page and will open into Outlook. You can also enter a local path to any folder to have it opened in a windows explorer window. Unfortunately this doesn’t work very well with the Jello Dashboard htm file. If you enter your Jello Dashboard path to the main file you can open it in Outlook but it would behave just like you opened it in internet explorer, asking you for permission to execute ActiveX content.

Anyway, though this might not be the perfect solution for opening Jello Dashboard inside Outlook, you can use it to add some web pages or folders you use regularly and want to have it easily accessible.

Examples:

• outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add http://www.jello-dashboard.net,”Jello Dashboard homepage”,1
• outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add “c:\Users\Nick\My Documents\”,”Documents”,1
• outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add “E:\projects\Jello 5\jello5.htm”,”Jello 5″,1