Need to link IE to Outlook via COM

Hey guys.

I dont know where exactly to post this so thats why i have put this here. I will be re-developing our current Client Management System from Access & VBA to PHP & MySQL.

I have been going through the current system and mapping out how i am going to reproduce all the functionality. I can reproduce everything in the system except the Outlook functionality. The current system runs on the users computer and so the VBA code can link into the local copy of Outlook via COM. PHP can do COM calls but its server based so its useless. I was wondering if there was any ActiveX codes that could be used to link into Outlook to do things like Tasks and Calendar entries.

Any advise on this would be great, I am sure there would be a way of doing it. I have searched the web and MSDN and found nothing.

hi koepke!
i think this is not possible "by default". because it would be a big-time security risk. imagine a new email-virus...

you will need to write your own ActiveX control for this. since this seems to be intranet-only use, it should not be a security problem.

another possibility could be connecting to an Exchange server if you have this in your network.

There is no exchange server so thats out. I was thinking i might have to write my own, i guess it will have to be a signed active x control too. And yes this is for intranet only use :-)

How would you write your own active x control? What language?

I will be using Microsoft Visual Basic to do it. You can also use Visual C++ but i dont know C++ very well. When you enter into Visual Basic you are asked what type of project you wish to create. One of the options is Active X control

one thing i did not think about yet yesterday:

maybe it is also possible using VBScript. you could try to instanciate the outlook com object. but it would probably notify users on every single access, so this could be quite annoying.

never tried, so i cannot even tell if it does work.

is there any way to sign VBScripts. I know you can sign the code of ActiveX controls but dont know about VBScripts. If I could sign the code I can setup the browser to always trust code from us. This would have to be done for the ActiveX control too i think.

i agree that you probably need to sign any of these solutions.

you can sign javascripts. so this should also be possible for vbscript. though i can´t tell you how either works do you have the complete developer studio or only VB?
for the studio, there has to be some reference in the online docs. not sure what comes with the "VB only" version...

I will need to find out how to sign code too since i dont know either

I think its just straight VB, not visual studio.