Sending a Meeting Invitation Update

[kevin.ingle]

I have developed an MS Access application for tracking reservations in
training classes. I am now adding the Outlook objects to trigger the
system to send an meeting invitation any time someone is registered in
a class. However, I'm running into a problem with sending the
invitations -- each time I add a person to the list, everyone in the
class receives an update to the meeting. When you are working within
the Outlook GUI, when you add a name to an existing meeting
invitation, you can click on "Send Update" and then select to send the
update only to the newly added or deleted names. I would like to
emulate that action programmatically. I'm very, VERY new to working
with the Outlook object set. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]]

AFAIK, there's no property or method in the Outlook Object Model that gives
you control over choosing who to send Meeting Request update notifications to.

The only way around this is to use the SendKeys VBA statement to automate
clicking the dialog, but it probably won't work anyway - it usually never
does work when you want it to in Outlook.

 

[JP]

Eric,
Wouldn't it depend on the Outlook version? According to
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011276781033.aspx, you can
do it (manually) in Outlook 2003.


--JP

 

[Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]]

The whole issue is getting control of update notifications in code - manually
it works!

 

[kevin.ingle]

So I suppose the only alternative is to send appointments rather than
meeting invitations?

 

[Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]]

But an Appointment item becomes a Meeting Request as soon as you add another
person to it! The only alternative I see is one Meeting Request per person -
but you'll have multiple conflicts.

 

[kevin.ingle]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest something really
weird...

Is it possible to:

A. Find a particular appointment/meeting in the calendar based on
external criteria (from my database);
B. Look at the list of recipients already in the meeting request;
C. Compare the name I want to add to the list to see if it is
already there (ie, is the list in a simple string format);
D. Strip the names already there, storing them in another string;
E. Add just the name that I want to send the request to;
F. Send the request (with just the one name);
G. Add the stripped names back in along with the new name; and
H. Save the item back to the folder without triggering another
send.

Wow, that made my brain hurt...

 

[Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]]

No, as the meeting will be updated as soon as you call the Send method (as it
has to save first), and that dialog asking how to send the notification will
pop up.

Otherwise, all that you propose can be coded, but the dialog will still
appear if you make changes to the attendees.

 

[kevin.ingle]

I've programmed in Excel, Access, and PowerPoint, and I think this is
the first time I've run into a situation where you cannot accomplish
something in code that can be done in the GUI. Absolutely stunning.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

There are many things you can do in the Outlook UI that cannot be done using
code. For some things there are workarounds, for many others there aren't.
If you develop Outlook code you learn to live with that.

 

[kevin.ingle]

Thank you all for your time and help. I'll give up on this idea and
try another solution.