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Thursday, July 28, 2005

Capture and download a LinkedIn search

The LinkedIn network provide powerfull tools to search for people. In some situations you wish to download the profiles of people for later inspection etc.
Unfortunately LinkedIn currently hasn't any tools for this - so DocLife BRM now support the Capture Search functionality, that download profiles found from a search on LinkedIn. It captures that last search you have made on LinkedIn.

Posted by Morten Marquard at 3:43 AM | 0 comments

Company info in your Inbox

DocLife BRM Add-in provides information about which company the email origines from diretly in your Inbox as outlined below:

Notice the Company column, marked with blue above. This column display company information from the contacts. In many cases this information is valuable when filtering and selecting important emails to deal with.


A posting on Ecademy raised the importance of this issue.

Posted by Morten Marquard at 3:25 AM | 0 comments

Using DocLife BRM Add-in

DocLife BRM Add-in has the following toolbar:
.
Clicking on
DocLife will open the following menu:

You can now download profiles from LinkedIn, Ecademy or OpenBC. When downloading contacts, the add-in will search for the Contact in a folder, and if found add information to the contact. If not found, it will add a new contact with the category "DocLife".

Please note that LinkedIn also has functionality that allow you to download contacts and import them into your Outlook, check here. While absolutely great LinkedIn finally offered this feature it doesn't handle updates of existing contacts, thereby adding duplicates!

When you open a contact you'll notice a few changes from the standard Outlook view:

Notice the four new menu's on the contact . When these menu items show up, you can click on them, and a browser window will show you the profile. Clicking
G will search the persons name on Google.

Downloading contacts might take a while depending on the number of contacts and your connection speed to the internet. My personal experience is that it takes approximately 4 seconds for each contact - and I'm on a medium ADSL connection and have a fairly old PC (850MHz). So downloading 1.000 contacts will take approximately 1 hour. Outlook will be blocked while you download!

After you download your contacts you can view them in the selected Outlook Contacts folder (default it will be named DocLife) as outlined below:

You can customize this view to include the fiends you need. Place the mouse over the Full Name column, right click the mouse and select Field Chooser. Select User defined fields in folder and add the fields you need by dragging them onto the Contacts bar.

Posted by Morten Marquard at 2:31 AM | 0 comments

Troubleshooting installation


In some situations the Add-in will not start.
As a start try selecting Tools->Options in Outlook which will show the following screen:

Then select the "Other" pane and Advanced Options which will show the following screen:



Then select "COM Add-Ins..." which should display the "DocLife Extension for Outlook" add-in among other Add-ins (if any). It will display the mscoree.dll, as well as potential errors such as, "cannot load mscoree.dll". This is most likely due to lack of some DLL's, such as msxml2, redemptions, etc.



A way to start troubleshooting this is to verify the following:

Your operating system:

  • Windows 2000 - you must have Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 installed, MSXML must also be installed
  • Windows XP - MSXML must be installed
Try to find the file addinerr.txt which is located in the TEMP directory, usually
C:\Documents and Settings\$USERID\Local Settings\Temp
If this file exists please send it to mailto:morten.marquard@gmail.com

DocLife Add-in in disabled items



In some situations, the DocLife Add-in can be added to Outlook's disabled items. This typically happens if something goes wrong, i.e. problems with installation.

In order to re-enable the Add-in click Help->About Outlook which will show you the following screen:



Then click Disabled Items which will show you the following screen:


Posted by Morten Marquard at 2:17 AM | 0 comments

Get and install DocLife BRM Add-in

You can download the DocLife BRM Add-in for Outlook XP/2003 here (not yet freely available. Please contact morten.marquard@gmail.com for details).

License
DocLife BRM Add-in for Outlook is freely available for private users. Corporate users can test it for one month before purchasing a license.

Pre-requisites

Installation

Once downloaded you can install the Add-in by double clicking on the installer. You need to re-start Outlook before the Add-in will show up in Outlook.

When you open Outlook the first time after you have installed the DocLife BRM Add-in you'll be prompted to enter your profile. You then need to enter your ID from the various networks you are member of.

During setup DocLife Add-in will try to locate the above ID's automatically, provided that you are logged into the various social networks from your internet browser.

You can find the ID's manually as follows:

Finally you must enter the folder where you wish to place your social networking contacts. From default this is set to DocLife. If you wish to place your contacts in your standard Outlook Contact folder, in English version of Outlook Contacts, remove DocLife from the field making it empty.

When you start Outlook after the installation a new menu is added .

Posted by Morten Marquard at 2:16 AM | 0 comments

Known issues

Microsoft Office Outlook Error in registry for extension "Exchange Extensions;?" error received.

When you start Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or when you open and then close the Add-In Manager dialog box in Outlook 2003, you may receive the following error message:

Microsoft Office Outlook Error in registry for extension "Exchange Extensions;?".

The syntax or format of the registry entry is incorrect. Check the registry settings and compare the registry for this extension to other extensions in the registry. This problem is corrected in Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Office 2003. For additional information, visit http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823633.

Posted by Morten Marquard at 12:38 AM | 0 comments