Exchange & Outlook®: Constructing Collaborative Solutions

Overview of the Forms Development Process

Let's take a moment to put everything into perspective. Why would you want to develop Outlook forms? Well, as we discussed in Chapter 5, "Microsoft Outlook 2000 Collaborative Basics," Microsoft Outlook is a simple email client. In fact, Outlook provides a rich environment for storing and manipulating information. You can use Outlook's existing functionality to store information regarding your contacts and appointments, and you can also define new types of objects and associated properties to store within the same environment, leveraging Outlook's phenomenal data management capabilities. Looking at it from this point of view, the reason for developing new Outlook forms is quite apparent—to store and manipulate ...