Tao of Mac

Sep 13th 2004 · 1 min read

Quick And Dirty Custom Project Folders

So you actually like Entourage's Project Center feature? Well, here's a quick hack to create a similar layout in 2003, based on my old Digital Dashboard hacks. First, create a search folder that shows you all the e-mail associated with your project. Then create an HTML file containing something like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Project Folder</title>
</head>
<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 scroll=no>
<OBJECT classid=CLSID:0006F063-0000-0000-C000-000000000046
id=calendar  height="70%" width="100%">
<param name="Namespace" value="MAPI">
<param name="Folder" value="Calendar">
<param name="DeferUpdate" value="0">
</OBJECT>
<OBJECT classid=CLSID:0006F063-0000-0000-C000-000000000046
id=mail  height="30%" width="50%">
<param name="Folder" value="Search Folders\My Project">
<param name="Namespace" value="MAPI">
</OBJECT>
<OBJECT classid=CLSID:0006F063-0000-0000-C000-000000000046
id=tasks height="30%" width="50%">
<param name="Folder" value="Tasks">
<param name="Namespace" value="MAPI">
<param name="Restriction" value="[Subject]='my project' or [Notes]='my project'">
<param name="DeferUpdate" value="0">
</OBJECT>
</body>
</html>

Now set this to be your folder's "home page" (right-click on it, etc.). will complain if it isn't hosted on a web server (duh? as if my hard disk wasn't safer), but it will work. There are also a few niggling issues with using custom views, but I can't figure it out without a COM object inspector and I don't have any development tools on my Windows laptop at the moment.

You can actually do it in HTML, too - see here.