FYI: DST 2007 exposes those who misuse CDO 1.21

mstehle — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:25:00 GMT

A couple notes from the field as we enter the window of time that is DST 2007...

Due to the security dialogs added to CDO 1.21 in the Outlook 2000 timeframe many people started to copy CDO 1.21 from an Exchange installation for us on client machines and application servers. As I have blogged about before the Outlook and Exchange CDO builds are somewhat different and we definitely don't support mixing components from Exchange and Outlook. So you shouldn't be installing Outlook and Exchange on the same machine or copying CDO.dll from one machine to the other for any reason.

If you have, DST 2007 will likely expose it...

CDO 1.21 carries its own timezone information and therefore all versions of CDO would need an update to properly work with the DST 2007 changes. If you have copied CDO.dll from another computer and registered on your machine our update will have no way of knowing it is there to update it. If you have installed Outlook and Exchange on the same machine only one of the CDO libraries can be registerd (usually last installed wins). If you install the Outlook update it will look at the install path to update files which may not be the registered components and the CDO.dll that your application uses will not be updated for DST.

If you find that you have applied CDO updates to an application server and it doesn't appear to acknowledge the time zone change you might want to search for CDO.dll and see if you have copied and registered CDO in another directory. You can also search the registry for "MAPI.Session" which is the root CDO 1.21 object that will indicate where the CDO.dll that is currently registered is installed. If it is not the default application path ("C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin\" for Exchange server installs and "C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\" for Outlook client installs) then we can't update it.

...This also applies to CDO for Windows (CDOSYS, cdosys.dll) and CDO for Exchange (CDOEX, cdoex.dll) which have their own time zone databases as well...

...Updated 3-12-2007 1:45 PM EDT...just fixed some grammar and sentence structure, added file names for CDOSYS and CDOEX...

OUTBOX: How to tell if the DST Rebasing Tool has been run on a mailbox?

mstehle — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:50:00 GMT

The rebasing tool adds time zone information to appointments that it touches. This time zone information is the same that Outlook 2007 (and patched versions of CDO 1.21) puts on appointments when it creates them. These time zone structures are described here…

http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2006/12/06/outlook-2007-timezone-structures.aspx

What that means is that we cannot discern between appointments that were touched by the rebasing tool and ones that were created or modified by “new” clients (Outlook 2007 or DST patched versions of CDO 1.21). There isn’t any marking on the mailbox itself so what you would have to do is iterate through items in the calendar folder and look for these properties on calendar items. If they exist on any appointment in the calendar then you know that the rebasing tool and/or “new” clients have been there.

You would need to use MAPI, CDO 1.21, or Outlook 2007’s object model to write this code. MAPI is not scriptable and you may not have Outlook 2007 available to you so I would suggest CDO 1.21. The following is a small VBA example which uses CDO 1.21 that you can run in Outlook which will pop up a message box telling you if new clients have been to this mailbox.

Sub Main()

Dim oSession As New MAPI.Session

oSession.Logon , , False, False, , True

Dim oFolder As MAPI.Folder

Set oFolder = oSession.GetDefaultFolder(CdoDefaultFolderCalendar)

Dim oMessages As MAPI.Messages

Set oMessages = oFolder.Messages

Dim oAppt As MAPI.AppointmentItem

Dim oFields As MAPI.Fields

Dim oField As MAPI.Field

For Each oAppt In oMessages

On Error Resume Next

Set oFields = oAppt.Fields

Set oField = oFields.Item("0x825E", "0220060000000000C000000000000046")

If Not oField Is Nothing Then

MsgBox "New clients have been here."

Exit For

End If

End Sub

…You can use this VBA code as the beginnings of a script to identify appointments that have been touched by the rebasing or “new clients”. If you don’t get any message box from this script that “New clients have been here” then you know either one of two things: 1) You don’t have any appointments in the calendar that you are the organizer of or 2) The rebasing tool or new clients have not touched any appointments in this calendar…

References:

CDOLive: Property Tags and Types

http://www.cdolive.com/cdo10.htm

BLOG: Outlook 2007 Time Zone Structures

http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2006/12/06/outlook-2007-timezone-structures.aspx

More Information:

GLEN: Creating a Summary Email of all appointments within a Users Calendar for given period

http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2007/02/creating-summary-email-of-all.html

GLEN: Creating a Report of Meeting Organizers for all appointments in all calendars on a Server via WebDAV

http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2007/02/creating-report-of-meeting-organizers.html

mstehle: The CDOs and CDONTS of Messaging Development : DST 2007

FYI: DST 2007 exposes those who misuse CDO 1.21

OUTBOX: How to tell if the DST Rebasing Tool has been run on a mailbox?