I finally got an iPhone, and will be syncing it to my company's Exchange environment.  I used to sync my WinMo phone with my personal world.  I wanted to start adding contact pictures so they would show up on my phone.  One by one was easy, but there are a few things where I wanted to add the same picture to a bunch of contacts.  Turns out that's easy too, with a little programming.

            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook._Application outlookApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
            NameSpace outlookNamespace = outlookApp.GetNamespace("MAPI");
            MAPIFolder contactsFolder = outlookNamespace.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts);

            foreach (ContactItem contact in contactsFolder.Items)
            {
                if (contact.Categories.ToString().Contains("something"))
                {
                    contact.AddPicture("C:\\Users\\username\\Pictures\\Contact Images\\image.gif");
                    contact.Save();
                    contact.Close(OlInspectorClose.olSave);
                }
            }

Along with my MacBook, I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion, knowing that someday I'd have a reason to run a Windows app, and today is the day.  Once again, its the lousy Entourage which is failing to meet my needs.  What Ineed to do is forward a complicated HTML message.  Entourage fails miserably.  OWA on either of the browsers on my Mac also fail (although not quite as badly as Entourage.)  Even IE7 on Windows fails to forward it correctly (the images don't come through.)  Now obviously I have access to Windows boxes, and can use them, but I'm using this excuse to set up an XP VM with Office 2003.

I use Exchange for our personal email.  This has worked great for me at work because we've used a POP/IMAP server for my business mail.  And even though the company's firewall blocks the POP/IMAP/SMTP ports to the outside world, Exchange will work over https with current versions of Outlook.  But, I have an issue.  My employer is currently rolling out Exchange.  Outlook isn't able to connect to two different Exchange servers in one profile, and isn't able to run more than one profile at the same time (even in two different user contexts if they are in the same window space.)

A quick Google found the Hammer of God site with a program called ExtraOutlook.exe.  While interesting (especially the description of how they found out what Outlook was doing) they don't actually say what their app does, which makes me nervous.