Force Outlook Today on Network

[Guest]

I have searched high and low for many months on this subject with no results
so I hope someone can help!

I am a system administrator of a medium-sized network who are all using
Outlook 2003. Management want to display messages to all staff using Outlook
Today so I have created a simple html page for them with the messages and,
using Group Policy, have pointed everybody's Outlook Today page to the URL of
that page. That works perfectly.

However, users will only see this if they choose to view the Outlook Today
page, which most don't. There must be SOME way to force Outlook to always
startup in Outlook Today for everyone but I can't find it. Setting your
startup folder for Outlook is easy enough through the client as a user and I
can't believe this setting isn't available through the admin template for
Outlook 2003 in Group Policy but it doesn't seem to be.

I'd obviously love to set this through Group Policy but if I can't then
surely it's possible to set the Outlook startup folder through the registry.
Does anybody know where the relevant key is? Thinking about it, if I can
find the key in the registry then I can create a custom admin template for
Group Policy and set it that way.

Any ideas, anyone?

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

I don't think you will find this an easy task to do via a gpo for the
following reasons...

1) Where the setting is stored. (Its actually part of the mail profile
section of the registry which means deducing what is the name of the Outlook
profile they are using and jumping to that location)

2) The value that needs to be set is based on the MAPI store id/folder id
and some other number that I can't figure out what in just under a few
minutes.