publishing custom forms

[ewillyb]

I've read a post by Sue Mosher, MS MVP, stating that "Publishing to a
public folder doesn't work for message forms."
The MS Knowledge Base articles on this merely say that the normal way
to do it is to publish to the Organizational Forms Library (Exchange
Server).

My question is, can anybody state definitively that Outlook Custom
Forms that extend the message item cannot be published to Public
Folders in a workable fashion.

My challenge is to allow many distributed Outlook clients the ability
to publish and share custom forms across an organization with multiple
levels of hierarchy in a central Exchange Server environment. Having
everybody publish to the same Exchange Server is not workable for
reasons having to do with organization, maintenance, and name
collisions.

Finally, can public folder stores be merely file servers, or are they
part of Exchange?

Thanks.
Eric

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

You can publish a message form to a public folder, for sure, but it doesn't make for a useful form. The key issue is how Outlook loads the form. Think about it: How would Outlook know to look in that particular folder among potentially thousands to get the form definition in order to display the form to the recipient?

Public folders are part of Exchange and can hold files or Outlook items.

 

[ewillyb]

When you say, "doesn't make for a useful form", are you saying that
Outlook cannot get the form definition from the Public Folder and
therefore the form will be displayed with the default Outlook message
form?

As for how would Outlook know to look in a particular folder, ummmm, I
imagine the item itself could have a metadata tag that could store the
Public Folder Node and its relationship to the overall tree. BUT, I'm
just speculating here. If you tell me that Outlook cannot do this,
then that is all I need to hear.

Thank you, Sue

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Yes, that's exactly it -- and the user will get an annoying message telling them that Outlook can't find the form.