Using Outlook with Domino instead of Lotus Notes

In some previous posts (here and here) I blogged about having to use Lotus Notes at work and some of the things I didn’t like about the client.

Well today I had a go at installing Microsoft’s Outlook Connector for Domino. The connector can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?FamilyID=8ebbba59-5f17-4e52-8980-c4f0dfa92d65&displaylang=en

Having installed the connector, I loaded up Outlook and proceeded to add a new email account (Tools > E-mail Accounts > Add a new e-mail account > Additional Server Types > Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for IBM Lotus Domino). You must have the Lotus Notes client application installed and configured to use the connector, so the connector will automatically get the settings.

This didn’t work for me, giving me a message about the service not being able to start. As always with errors, I did a Google search and found many posts where people said that they went through uninstalling each update to Office 2003 since SP2 (note this connector is not designed for Office 2007).

This seemed long winded and should be my last resort.

Eventually I found another blog that told me to make sure the path to the Lotus Notes executable was in the PATH environment variable. On my system this was no longer there. So I added it (Right-click Computer > Properties > Advanced system settings > Environment Variables > Add it to System variables).

On my Vista system my path was C:\lotus\notes, which contained all the DLLs and the nlnotes.exe executable.

I then loaded Outlook again and it picked up my settings. Sorted!

I can’t open the Shared Calendar yet, but I’ll let you know when I have that working also!

Neil

How to: Slipstream Office 2007 with Service Pack 2

Whenever I do a clean installation of Windows on my machines, its always a pain having to install the Service Packs for the relevant application separately from the application itself.

Thankfully, with some applications, its possible to slipstream, or integrate the latest Service Pack with the original files and build your self a new CD or ISO file.

Here’s how for Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2):

1) Copy the contents of the Office 2007 installation media to a temporary folder, for this example: D:\Office2007.

2) Download the Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) from here:

Download details: The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5&displaylang=en

3) Place the SP2 download in a temporary folder, for this example: D:\Office2007-Updates.

4) Open a Command Prompt and run the following command:

   D:\Office2007-Updates\office2007sp1-kb936982-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:"D:\Office2007\Updates" 

5) Agree to the Microsoft Software License Terms, and then the update will be extracted to D:\Office2007\Updates.

6) Burn the folder D:\Office2007 to optical media (DVD) or create an ISO file.

Office 2007 will now install and then automatically install any updates.