Publishing Forms

After customizing your forms, you need to make them available to your users. There are three primary ways you can distribute your forms to users:

• Publish the form in a forms library. The forms library can be the Organizational Forms Library, a folder forms library, your Personal Forms Library, or a web forms library. This is the most common distribution method.
• Save the form definition with the item, and send the item to your users. This option is best suited for one-off forms where users need to use the form only once.
• Save the form to the file system as an .oft file, and attach it to an e-mail that you send to your users. Your users can then use the form from their file systems or publish the form in their Personal Forms Library.

The following sections describe each of these methods in detail.

Publishing Forms in a Forms Library

As you learned in Chapter 3, Outlook supports four types of forms libraries, and each type meets a specific need for forms publishing:

• The Organizational Forms Library. Use this library to publish public forms that should be available to the entire company.
• Folder forms library. Use this library to publish forms in specific folders. To compose a form from this library, users must either click on the folder in the Choose Form dialog box or open the folder and launch the form from the Actions menu. Any user can create forms in their own personal folders and users with editor, publishing editor, or owner permissions can create forms in a public folder.
• Personal Forms Library. Use this library to publish personal forms. This library, which is stored on the local machine, cannot be shared with other users in the organization. Publish personal templates and forms to this library, and test your forms there before deploying them to your users.
• Web forms library. A web forms library is stored using Microsoft Outlook Web Access. It can contain Outlook forms that were either converted to HTML or that you created using HTML.

Note that Outlook also allows you to create personal folder files (.pst files). These files implement the same functionality as your personal mail folders, so you can create new folders in these personal store files and publish forms to the folders. Since you can save the forms to your local hard disk, you can e-mail or copy them to a floppy for distribution.

To publish your forms to a forms library, follow these steps:

1. In design mode, from the Tools menu, point to Forms and then select the Publish Form As option.
2. From the Look In drop-down list, select the forms library where you want to publish the form.
3. In the Display Name box, type the friendly name of your form. Outlook automatically fills in the Form Name box for you. (Note that this name will appear in the caption at the top of the form.) If you want to use a separate form name from the display name, type a name in the Form Name box.
4. Click Publish.

Saving the Form Definition with the Item

As you learned earlier in this chapter, you should save the form definition with an item when you know that the users will not have the form anywhere in their systems. If the definition is saved with the item, Outlook uses the saved version of the form, which is the most current. If the definition is not saved with the item, Outlook looks for the form definition in other locations. To save the form definition with the form, in design mode, click the form's Properties tab. Check the Send Form Definition With The Item check box to enable it.

You need to keep two issues in mind when you consider whether to save the form definition with the item. The first issue is security—particularly when VBScript is used to customize the form. To alleviate security concerns, Outlook provides a security measure when users receive an item with a form containing VBScript. Since Outlook supports customizing forms with VBScript, this is a necessary precaution. Without it, users could send malicious forms containing VBScript which could, for example, delete data on your hard drive. This security measure displays a warning message box, as shown in Figure 5-23, allowing the user to either enable or disable the VBScript in the form. This security warning will appear only if the form has the definition saved with it, is not published in any of the forms libraries, and has VBScript included with it.

The second issue to note is that when you save the form definition with the item, you cannot take advantage of the automatic update capabilities of Outlook forms. For example, if you change the form, the new version of the form will be included only with new items you create based on it. Any old items will use whatever form definition was originally saved with the item.

Figure 5-23 The warning message that displays when a form has the definition saved with the item and also contains VBScript.

NOTE

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When you attempt to publish a form, Outlook 98 will prompt you about whether you want to save the form definition with the item.

Saving the Form as an .oft File

Outlook allows you to save your forms as Outlook template, or .oft, files. This enables you to embed the form in a mail message and send it to users who are both internal and external to the organization. Your users open the form using the attachment, and they either return the form completed or publish the form in a forms library. Saving your custom forms as .oft files is one way to create backups of your custom forms. To save a form as an .oft file, in design mode, select Save As from the File menu. In the Save In box, select the location to which you want to save your file. In the File Name box, type a name for your file.