Why Host a Digital Dashboard in Outlook?

[Previous] [Next]

You might be wondering why you should host your dashboard in Outlook rather than in a Web browser. There are a number of advantages and a couple of disadvantages to using Outlook to host a Digital Dashboard. However, I think the pros far outweigh the cons.

Outlook is usually the only application that users leave open the entire time they're working on their computer—which is the first reason you should host your Digital Dashboard there. What better way to encourage use of your dashboard than to integrate it into the productivity application that users work with a majority of the time? Besides, your users probably won't want to host a separate application to run a Digital Dashboard. To improve your dashboard's accessibility, you can provide links directly to it from the Outlook bar.

Second, the Outlook View control is locked down programmatically when it runs inside a Web browser. You saw this in the discussion of the Team Folder Wizard in Chapter 9. If you want to harness the full power of the View control—and for that matter, the Outlook object model—you need to host your dashboard in Outlook. Also, the Outlook Databinding control that you'll see later in this chapter does not work outside the Outlook environment.

The ease of using COM add-ins is the third reason to host your Digital Dashboard in Outlook. For example, you could build an add-in that provides a wizard to customize your dashboard or that synchronizes content from databases or the Internet. You could build similar technologies in a Web browser-only environment, but you'd have to program them as ActiveX controls or server-side implementations. COM add-ins give you the benefits of component technologies and offload the processing to the client computer; in other words, your component can work in both a connected state and a disconnected state.

Finally, hosting your Digital Dashboard in Outlook allows for the offline synchronization of Exchange Server information and Web information. You can synchronize Folder home pages offline so that users can work with them when disconnected from the network. The only catch is that Outlook Today Web pages do not synchronize offline. You'll see how to get around this when we discuss deployment of the Digital Dashboard later in this chapter.

As I mentioned, there are a couple of compelling reasons not to host your Digital Dashboard in Outlook. Aside from not having the application, you might be inclined to host your dashboard elsewhere if you have a need for a roaming dashboard. For example, users who take a lot of business trips might frequently access information from more than one computer. If you can't guarantee that the computer being used by a dashboard user will have Outlook, you might want to host your dashboard directly in a browser.