Functionality
This Outlook add-in publishes part of your appointments, contacts, tasks and notes as WML files to a particular location. You can access these data from your WAP phone when this location can be accessed from the Internet. Additionally you can forward incoming mails or reminders to your cell phone via SMS or to your pager. The publishing of the WML files can be done either by copying them to a share or by transferring them to your Web site via HTTP. I would appreciate if somebody could provide publishing via FTP. The forwarding of notifications can be done either by sending a mail or by issuing an URL. A property page appearing as tab “WAP/SMS” under Tools > Options in Microsoft Outlook does the configuration of publication and notifications. By means of this property page you can configure: 

• Which items are published as WML (appointments, due tasks, contacts, notes) 

• How many days in the future appointments and tasks are to be captured 

• Whether only contacts or notes with a particular category should be published

• For which kind of events notifications should be sent (new mails, reminders, meeting requests)

• Whether only high priority mails and reminders should be forwarded

• Whether you want you publish the items as static WML or ASP files.

Prerequisites
The add-in only works in Microsoft Outlook 2000 and above because it uses the COM add-ins model. To access the generated WML files you need to publish them to a location which you can access from the phone. You can specify a file path or an URL. In the first case the publishing is done simply by file copy. In the second case (URL) you need to install Microsoft's msxml3.dll.
When you want to forward mails and reminders as SMS you also have two choices: if you are an SAP colleague you can install an ActiveX control providing SMS transfer from here. If not, you can send the SMS and pager messages via HTTP. This again requires Microsoft's msxml3.dll. In the sample I have configured sending of SMS via www.billiger-telefonieren.de. For more about the SMS send see here.
When you want to publish the WAP pages as ASP files (can be configured on the Options dialog) you need n Microsoft IIS.

Installation
There are three ways to install the WAP add-in:

1. You can download the OCX directly thru my download page. Navigating to this page automatically downloads the OCX and registers it. Prerequisite for this installation method is that you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or later and that the security options for ActiveX scripting, ActiveX download and ActiveX processing are enabled.
   I recommend to temporarily add *.klemid.de or *.schmidks.de to the list of trusted sited and change the settings for trusted sites rather than changing the settings for the Internet.

2. You can download the ol2wap.ocx and register it using regsvr32.exe. Or, you can download my registering tool to register it.

After one of the above installation steps, restart Microsoft Outlook.

Additional installation steps are:

1. My SAP colleagues should download ActiveX component DirectSend.ocx and register it. This component will perform the sending out of SMS messages from within the SAP network.

2. If you want to send SMS via HTTP or publish the WAP pages via HTTP download Microsoft's msxml3.dll .

3. If you want to publish your items as ASP files, you have to copy the files bss.inc and contacts.aspd into your home directory where you publish the other files to. Rename .aspd to .asp. These files are also contained in ZIP .

Usage
After successful installation of the add-in, first configure the publishing and notifications in Outlook under Tools > Options > WAP/SMS. After the configuration the publishing of WML files will happen each time an appointment, contact, task, or note meeting the conditions is created, modified, or deleted. Under Publish at enter either a path like \\myserver\myhome or a URL like http://www.mydomain.com/myoutlook. The latter requires msxml3.dll to be installed (see above). As Email/SMS/Pager address enter a valid phone number, e.g. +4917147114711.
The files which are published are outlook.wml, appt.wml, contact.wml, task.wml, notes.wml ,note#.wml, and apptask.wml. Outlook.wml contains the menu from which the other files are invoked. The '#' stands for a number. Each note is published as as separate file.

How it works
Note that the add-in solution is a personal solution rather than a corporate one. The reason is that it only works when the Outlook client is up and running and that is not security at all for the published items. On the other hand the solution circumvents restrictions that your Exchange administrator may have built. For example, in some companies forwarding of mails is restricted to addresses within the Exchange network. With this client-based solution this restriction doesn't apply. Another restriction might be that you are not allowed to install CDO server scripts into your mailbox. Each time an appointment, contact, or task is added, modified or deleted the publishing of WML files is triggered. Each time a new mail or a meeting request arrives or a reminder pops up which fits the configuration options, a notification is send via mail, SMS, or pager.

Known issues
Each time a publish takes place there may be a small delay when an item is stored, modified, or deleted.
When you have a lot of information to publish it may happen that the files become too big for your WAP phone. For contacts there is a splitting into several pages when you publish as ASP files rather than as static WML pages.
Publishing as ASP files of course only works when your Web server is an Microsoft IIS.
It may happen that a notification for new mail is delivered several times. This happens because the time check is based on minutes rather than an seconds. This effect is increased when there is a time difference between the Outlook client machine and the Exchange server.
In the options dialog the configuration of the notifications is implemented by switching to another set of controls being visible on the page. The reason for this is that modal dialogs cannot be popped up from a property page due to a bug in Microsoft Outlook.  

  Revisions