My employer will be migtrating to Outlook 2007 next month. I am hoping that it will offer more features than our present software, GroupWise, because I have been pushing up against the limits of e-mail and document routing (MS Word) recently, and could use some assistance. I have been slowly looking at Outlook Plug-Ins, but my employer will most likely not permit additional software to be installed. so, taking things one step at a time, does anybody know if Outlook allows you to attached notes or comments to messages that you have sent or received? If not, does anybody have any alternate suggestions? Its a small step towards organization, but it might help me when things get a bit crazy, not unlike a recent deal that involved five parties and ten lawyers.

--Ken

Ken.

does anybody know if Outlook allows you to attached notes or comments to messages that you have sent or received?

Yes. It does.

Right now I can only give you instructions on how to to it in the German version. I try to find out the English names of the commands.

Franz

Thank you, Franz.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

does anybody know if Outlook allows you to attached notes or
comments to messages that you have sent or received? If not, does anybody have any
alternate suggestions?

I don't know if this is the best way but I used to use this quick and dirty method before I started linking the messages to UltraRecall.

Outlook 2007 will allow you to edit the message. With message open> "Other actions|Edit message. I just enter my comments into the message.

########comment on 2009/08/06#######
followed up with phone call
##########

Body of message



Remember to save.

-Bill

Bill,

I would normally try what you are recommending, but we need to archive and print our messages for records retention purposes, and I would not necessarily want my comments to be a permanent part of the text body of the message.

--Ken

Ken...I hesitated about that suggestion when I saw the word lawyer in your post.

I haven't used the Journal in Outlook 2007. My distant recollection from previous versions is that I could automatically link MS Office documents, Outlook items ie notes, email, appointments to a specified Contact. There were/are several Journal views that allow manual linking of items. Perhaps there is something in the Journal that will help until you can convince them to add a little visual basic script to do exactly what you want or Franz comes through with a solution.

-Bill

Hi.

I was going to recommend the trick Bill described, too.

Well, when you need archiving the original mails, I think there is no out-of-the-box feature in Outlook that allows you to do what you need. The Journal is not really suited for this kind of comments. And linking a file or a note to emails is not possible (though linking files to contacts or tasks is).

In Germany, I would recommend a commercial Outlook add-in called "Email-Notizen Pro" by a small German software company:
http://www.add-in-world.com/katalog/email-notizen-pro

Their website says the add-in is compatible to Outlook 2000-2003 but I can't see why it should not work with Outlook 2007.

I do not know whether they also have an English version available. But I know that they cooperate with several English-speaking developers and translated some English Outlook add-ins and tools into German.

Franz

$Bill wrote:

Ken...I hesitated about that suggestion when I saw the word lawyer in your post.

I
haven't used the Journal in Outlook 2007. My distant recollection from previous
versions is that I could automatically link MS Office documents, Outlook items ie
notes, email, appointments to a specified Contact. There were/are several Journal
views that allow manual linking of items. Perhaps there is something in the Journal
that will help until you can convince them to add a little visual basic script to do
exactly what you want or Franz comes through with a solution.

Journal is MS's solution to this problem. The journal entries can be automatically created from any email from selected contacts or they can be created manually from the item. There is a link to the email and a number of tools to annotate the message. I've used it extensively and, while I'd rather just have a field to enter notes into that is a property of the email, itself, the solution isn't a bad one. Having moved to Entourage on the Mac, I have to say that I miss it.

Tom S.

Thank you for the suggestion - Journal looks interesting. I just wonder if there will be an easy way to attach the entry to the message so I can have the entry immediately avaialable when I look at the message.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

Thank you for the suggestion - Journal looks interesting. I just wonder if there will
be an easy way to attach the entry to the message so I can have the entry immediately
avaialable when I look at the message.

Nor can I. I could be wrong but I don't think its can be done easily. I don't think that the link is two way.

I'm working from memory here, since, I haven't used Windows regularly in a while. But, assuming that you can have and use Office, perhaps your boss won't object to OneNote (which is a standard part of at least some versions of the suite)? I seem to remember that this does create a two way link some how, though I can't remember exact how it does it. It might be worth looking into.

Sorry,
Tom

Ken

I just wonder if there will be an easy way to attach the entry to the message
so I can have the entry immediately
avaialable when I look at the message.

That is not possible. You get that information only when in the Journal and not in the email module.

Another solution: Get an application/add-in that automatically saves all emails from certain clients to your hard disk. The mails will be stored in a text format (HTML, text only, MSG, ...) and can then be processed by other applications.

An inexpensive add-in that does that - and much more - is Outlook Attachment Sniffer (http://www.rsbr.de/index_eng.htm A lifetime licence costs 15 Euro (about $18).

Franz

Thank you for the suggestions. I will need to think more about how I want to proceed. I did ask about One Note, since they just installed Office 2007. It appears that One Note was not part of the license. It just seems so simple that you would think that a notes field would be an integral part of the program.

--Ken

An alternative solution...

What about Treepad with ABC Amber Outlook Converter?

You would select messages from Outlook, run the converter, and open them in Treepad as separate nodes. Then you would be able to organize, annotate, and do all that Treepad does.

1tim wrote:

An alternative solution...

What about Treepad with ABC Amber Outlook
Converter?

You would select messages from Outlook, run the converter, and open
them in Treepad as separate nodes. Then you would be able to organize, annotate, and do
all that Treepad does.

Thanks for this suggestion. I will look into it and see if it is possible givne our IT policies at work.

--Ken

Ken,

I would appreciate it if you would let us know if you find an appropriate solution to this problem. The more I think about it, the more I am frankly astounded that there is no good way to annotate an email in these programs without an addin. Outlook isn't the only one with the deficiency. You would have thought the guys at Google would have set something up with Gmail if nothing else. Its a massive hole, particularly since people rely more and more on indexing search engines to find their reference materials now a days. I've run into similar problems annotating files without third party programs because I need a cross-platform solution and every file system is different. But that is a problem for another day, I guess.

Thanks,
Tom S.

Tom,

I share your disbelief in something that seems so obvious to many of us. Unfortunately, I am thinking that there may not be many solution beyond the suggestions above or something similar. We are not actually scheduled to convert to Outlook until late September, so it may be a while before I can report back with any news. But, if something does come up, I promise that I will share it with everybody here.

--Ken