Confirm Tracking (v2000)

Topic

New Reply

My department frequently sends out important documents to individual employees and we require they sign a form confirming they read & understand the document and return it to us. We then file the forms and load the confirmation info. (document name, employee name, date received, etc.) into an Access database.

I finally convinced them to allow an Outlook e-mail reply serve as confirmation. We still have to capture pertinent information in the Access database so I tried using the Yes/No options and copying the information from the reply and pasting it in Access. Unfortunately, the information parses with each space.

Does anyone have something set-up to mechanically capture data from a reply and move it into Access, Excel or anything else for that matter?
Thanks!!

Reply | Quote

Replies

If the reply e-mail has a fixed layout, extracting the relevant information should be possible, but if it is more or less free form, or if the recipients insert remarks (and if they can, they will!), it will be more difficult. Can you provide more info about how the e-mail is set up?

Reply | Quote

All I really need is the name and subject. Is it possible to mecahnize the Outlook export so the user doesn’t have to do anything?

Reply | Quote

You could use Automation to process the e-mails from Access. It could be completely automatic (using a timer on a form that runs the processing each hour or so), or semi-automatic (someone pushes a button on a form to initiate the processing).
Do you have a dedicated e-mail account for the replies? If so, the code could read ALL replies in the Inbox for this account, process them and then move them to another folder, so that they won’t be processed again. If not, how can the relevant replies be distinguished from other e-mail?

Reply | Quote

Hans,
I think that’s the direction I was looking for. As always, I thought there would be some neat pre-packaged Microsoft solution (in that case, why would they need me). I like the timer idea. I’ve never set code to run on a timer…I assume the On Timer event is the one I would need – correct? If so, what code instructs Access to repeat the code every (let’s say) 60 minutes?
As always, Thanks!

Reply | Quote

Set the Timer Interval property of the form to the number of milliseconds between repeats. So to repeat the code every 60 minutes, set Timer Interval to 3600000 (60 * 60 * 1000).
Setting the Timer Interval to 0 turns the Timer off. Don’t set Timer Interval to a small positive value (say less than 500 or so) – Access can’t handle that.

Put the code to process the mails in a procedure or function and call that from the On Timer event of the form:

Private Sub Form_Timer()
Call ProcessMails
End Sub

where ProcessMails is the name of the procedure/function.

Reply | Quote

(Edited by JohnBF on 29-Mar-05 09:10. )

When you say “the Yes/No options” do you mean the voting buttons? Are you trying to automat the kind of vote result tracking described in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 197420 and Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 195797? (The information is for Outlook 2000 but applies to subsequent versions.) This Sue Mosher ITPro article provides some of the internals.

Reply | Quote

Hi John,
I looked at KB #197420 and it appeared I would be able to use this approach perfectly. The only problem was when I copied the information and pasted it, it parsed the date on each blank space. Any thoughts on how to prevent that?

Reply | Quote