How do I sort contacts by recent activity

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strazz - 22 Jul 2005 19:47 GMT

I want to be able to sort my contacts by the most recent activity so I know
which ones I haven't contacted in a while. I am not using Business Contact
manager, I just want it to look at recent emails, journal entries, etc. and
deliver me a list of contacts sorted by the most recent activity entry.

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Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook] - 23 Jul 2005 04:14 GMT

Outlook provides no way to do that, because it stores no data in the
individual contact that could be used to get a last activity date. The
Activities list is built on the fly with a search.

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Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx

> I want to be able to sort my contacts by the most recent activity so I know
> which ones I haven't contacted in a while. I am not using Business Contact
> manager, I just want it to look at recent emails, journal entries, etc. and
> deliver me a list of contacts sorted by the most recent activity entry.

Reply to this Message

strazz - 23 Jul 2005 05:46 GMT

Can that search be accessed by a C# .NET addin? I would just iterate through
each contact, performing the search and then picking the most recent activity
date . Then associate each contact with their respective dates. Certainly
this data has to be somewhere in the Outlook coding model.

> Outlook provides no way to do that, because it stores no data in the
> individual contact that could be used to get a last activity date. The
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> > manager, I just want it to look at recent emails, journal entries, etc. and
> > deliver me a list of contacts sorted by the most recent activity entry.

Reply to this Message

Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook] - 23 Jul 2005 14:43 GMT

The Activities pane search is not exposed programmatically. Instead, you
would need to perform your own deep traversal search of the entire store
using Application.AdvancedSearch. One DASL schema property to use would be
http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062008-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/853a101f
or
http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062008-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/8586001f.
These properties will get at least the appointment, journal, and task items
that are explicitly linked. You would need to perform additional searches to
get mail messages to and from the contact and any meetings or task requests
for them.

Signature

Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx

> Can that search be accessed by a C# .NET addin? I would just iterate through
> each contact, performing the search and then picking the most recent activity
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> > > manager, I just want it to look at recent emails, journal entries, etc. and
> > > deliver me a list of contacts sorted by the most recent activity entry.

Reply to this Message