Building a timeline

[Wannabe]

My boss would like a calendar looking webpage that shows events and a
timeline on the calendar. Similar to something you see in Outlook when you
schedule an event that lasts more than one day, but using a start and end
date stored in our application's database. I've never used Outlook like this
and do not know if I can, so I am wondering how to tackle this problem. Can I
do this using Outlook components? If so, is there a good example to get me
started? Is there another approach I can take in developing a solution? One
big constraint is that we cannot buy any third party components at this time.
I would appreciate any help on this. Thank you.

 

[Jeff Dillon]

How about Outlook Web Access?

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/code/OWA/index.html

 

[Wannabe]

Thanks for the reply, but I failed to mention that the calendar needs to be
embedded in our custom application. Any other thoughts?

 

[Mohamad Elarabi [MCPD]]

Well, you can use outlook controls to view an existing Exchange calendar in
the public folders. An outlook calendar control is an actual instance of
outlook.exe and thus it will only work for users with exchange accounts, and
it should behave just as the outlook calendar.

Note that this isn't OWA, this is a Calendar control that is in a dll in the
outlook folder on your machine. I think it is called outlctl.dll.

Search for outlctl.dll on your machine and use that dll to get the controls
into the control bar. You can then drag the control onto your page in design
view to add it to your page. In html view, edit the <object> tag to specify
which calendar in exchange it should default to.

Note the following. Last time I did this was with outlook 2000, 2003 with
exchange 2000. I did use dhtml to change the view on the client side but the
default view (weekly, monthly, daily) defaults to your local outlook calendar
view, you can however provide buttons on the page to change the view using
DHTML or JScript.

This should do the job but it has its problems, unless MS enhanced it in the
newer versions of outlook, I know some functionality were dropped out of
outlctl.dll in outlook 2003 due to security. Hopefully you have better luck
than I did with this.