V-card information

[Guest]

How can I prevent ACTIVITIES from being sent with v-cards in Outlook 2003?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

You can stop being paranoid about this. No one is monitoring the activities in your Outlook folders. A vCard is a text file that contains information about a contact. You can see this for yourself by opening it in Notepad. It contains no information about activities. REPEATING: It contains no information about activities.

The Activities page builds a list *on the fly* of items related to the current contact. It builds that list from the *current user's* Outlook folders. If someone has activities related to you, they'll see them when they open the vCard you sent, because Outlook creates one of its own contacts from the vCard. If you open that vCard yourself, Outlook creates a contact with your information on it, and that contact's Activities page will show all the activities in your folders involving you.

If you still don't believe me, save the vCard to your hard drive and open it in Notepad.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Guest]

Sue

Thanks for your response. In fact, I sent a v-card to myself and undert he
Actvities tab is a list of hundreds of my activities. Unfortunately I
distributed this to many of my clients. Doubtless noone would have noticed,
but the vcard also somehow added my birthday to everyone's calendar at my
client's office and they were all wondering how that happened. One of them
started going through the tabs and they realized they had my activities as
well. this is not paranoia, this happened, and I would like to know how to
turn it off. Thanks John

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Read my message again, especially the second and third paragraphs. A vCard contains no such activity data. What users were seeing was ****THEIR OWN DATA***** related to you, e.g. email messages exchanged with you.

Outlook has a built-in feature to add birthdays of contacts to the Calendar folder.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Guest]

Sue
Thanks for your response. I will verify the Activities info. How can I
prevent the birthday info from being sent

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Delete the birthday from your contact record before you save the vCard. Or open the .vcf file in Notepad and delete it there.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[BMC]

Sue: I appreciate seeing your response to this guy but I have to say it would
be helpful for you guys to put some warning about this in the help section. I
had the same panic response when thinking about attaching a VCARD to my
company website. I spent 2 hours today looking for some explanation for what
was happening or a way to delete the activities tab or lock out the link. If
you'd just let people know what that Activities tab was for and how it
worked, it would save a lot of time for many users.

 

[Judy Gleeson \(MVP Outlook\)]

MVPs are not in control of anything Microsoft does inclduing what's in the
Help files. We are volunteers helping you try to get the most from their
software. We do make suggestions but we do not work for Microsoft.
www.microsoft.com/mvp explains who we are.

Regards

Judy Gleeson
MVP Outlook
Trainer and Consultant www.pragmatix.com.au


..

 

[kaki]

We are having the same issues bout the Activities being shared with the v-card
We have sent it in several different formats and can still see the
activities when the v-card is opened by the reciever. Is there a way to
format in properties?

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

We are having the same issues bout the Activities being shared with the
v-card
We have sent it in several different formats and can still see the
activities when the v-card is opened by the reciever. Is there a way to
format in properties?

Activities are not sent in the vCard. Prove it to yourself: open the vCard
file in Notepad. You won't see any activities. What the recipients are
seeing are activities kept in their own Journal for that person.