SIMS to Outlook - Alpha Build 2265
Author: Dan Clark - dan@danclark.co.uk

Note: This utility is not developed by, supported by, supplied by or in any way connected with Capita Education Services or Capita Group (or subsidiaries thereof). Please do not send mail to ANY Capita address relating to this product.

Purpose

This utility allows the transfer of Appointment Items (also known as Diary Items) between the SIMS .net Diary, and Outlook 2003. This utility has two main functions:

• Import from Outlook, allowing the Import of individually selected appointment items between two selected dates - which will appear in the SIMS .net Diary (and on each users' homepage).
• Export to Outlook, allowing Export of a group of event types (Diary Events, Public Holidays, Exam Seasons, Inset Days, Training Days, Timetable Periods, etc) between a set of dates.

This utility is currently an alpha utility, and should be considered unstable! Outlook is difficult to interoperate with; and errors will occur. In the first instance, please restart outlook and the program - and then restart your machine before reporting any form of bug. There is almost no error handling in this release on the outlook side.

This program requires access to the Outlook - and security messages may appear requiring you to confirm temporary access so that events can be imported.

Please use care when importing to Outlook and importing into SIMS .net - it is difficult to easily clean up events on bulk, and therefore this can create large amounts of work!

Use

Do not copy this utility into the SIMS .net directory. It should be extracted and used in a separate directory with all files in the compressed archive. This utility requires picks up the connect.ini file in the SIMS .net directory.

Use of the program is simple - start the utility and provide your SIMS Username and Password. You will need appropriate calendar permissions to use this utility correctly.

Known Issues / Bugs / "Todo"

• Outlook may sometimes hang - and will prevent use of the calendar until outlook is restarted (outlook.exe may have to be terminated and possibly the machine rebooted). Cause currently unknown; possibly related to COM instance not being correctly released.
• This utility only works with Outlook 2003, other versions are completely unsupported and untested.
• The "Do Not Duplicate" option does not have any effect where the "All Day Event" flag is used. This will be corrected in the next version.
• It is not possible to select individual events to export to outlook; only the event types.
• The utility does not drop the database signature when closed
• There is a limitation on the size of text a calendar entry can have; limited to approximately 30 characters. The imported Appointment Item from outlook is appropriately truncated; allowing the location to be concatenated.
• Removal of the "Generic event" category from within SIMS .net will result in errors during import.
• All events are imported as "Generic event" event types into SIMS .net from Outlook. It is not possible to specify a custom category currently.
• Appointment Reminders in Outlook are disabled for exported events.
• The only folders within Outlook for Export / Import are the personal / default folders. Public folders are not supported; neither are shared mailboxes.
• No permissions checking occurs. If you do not have access to the Calendar Process, the utility will error.
• All imported diary events are public by default. This cannot currently be changed.

Revisions

v0.2 - Alpha Version (2005 - Current)
Import added to application. Export refined, appointment reminders no longer set. Application UI split out into several forms; UI tidied. More verification logic added. Dynamic Binder added to allow multi-version interfacing against SIMS.

v0.1 - Unreleased & Experimental (2005)
Export to Outlook only. Highly buggy; no options offered. Set appointment reminder time to 15 minutes. SIMS version fixed; required independent copy of Assemblies.

Disclaimer

This utility has been developed by a 3rd Party and is not endorsed or supported by Capita Education Services, Capita (or any division thereof) or any other company in any way. You use this utility at your own risk, and accept responsibility for all damage and data loss that occurs from this utility. Please ensure you have database backup before using this utility.

Please feed back comments to the author by email as provided at the top of this readme.htm file.

SIMS is a Trademark of Capita Education Services.