Sue,
Hmm... I just tried it and that works. Strange, I could have sworn that
wasn't working before. Perhaps that was on our test box that only had
Outlook installed on it. Probably my bad. BTW: When I referred to a
shared-in folder, that was just a shared folder. I been making the
distinction at work between a folder that has had the permissions set to
allow sharing via "Share my contacts" (shared-out) vs. the other side of it,
the folder the user sees after they select "Open Shared Contacts..."
(shared-in).

Anyway, getting back to the original problem, I'm looking for a way to show
activities across mailboxes or by looking in shared folders. I'm now
convinced that Outlook can't inherently do that, but suppose for a moment
that your captain said "make it so." Where would you start looking for a way
around this limitation?

I looked at the slipstick page you referenced, but I didn't really see
anything in there that would solve the problem without bringing in its own
issues. I really need to stay within the Outlook UI.

I've so far considered these possibilities:
* Set up a dummy mailbox and set up some sort of synchronization that copies
everything from both boxes and merges them into this one and have the
activities thingy search in there, although that means when they double
click entries and mod it, I would need to get it back to the original
location, so the sync would have to be two-way. (ExOLEDB event sinks
perhaps)
MBX/A <--sync--> MBX/dummy/a-folder
MBX/R <--sync--> MBX/dummy/r-folder

* Do the dummy mailbox idea but somehow do a double-reference (kinda like LN
in Linux does for files) where both the normal mailbox and the dummy one
point to the same stuff. I'd be scared of this because while it might be
possible, it might be something ESEUTIL /G would call corrupt -- just like
you can double reference file data in on FAT disks by hacking the starting
cluster, but CHKDSK balks and calls them crosslinked.
MBX/dummy/a-folder = pointer to MBX/A
MBX/dummy/r-folder = pointer to MBX/R

* Write a custom form that mimics activities. That sounds like a lotta work
and I'm not even sure it could be done, or done well.
* Write a web page that they can jump to that runs that search, although
then I've broken out of the Outlook UI and lost a lot of the features of
that.
* Make a custom form page that basically has two of those activities
controls side-by-side and searching in the two mailboxes (although it won't
always be just two and it still doesn't give me a merged view that I can
sort and all that fun stuff. I'm not sure this is even possible anyway.)

Is there some other possibility I'm not considering here? Which way sounds
best? Know any hot-shot consultant that can make this happen for us? (we're
in St. Louis).

Thanks for all your help so far. I really appreciate your involvement in
this group.
-LZ