Adriano wrote:

> Hi,
> i'm looking for some materials (also just ready solution by third part
> company could be ok) that allow to automagically synconize (merge)
> data between a firebird database and outlook.
> Any hints ?
>

Since you did not get any answer yet I will try to (briefly) outline my
experiences with outlook. Though I'll probably get hit by being
off-topic. You problem is largely outlook related and not so much
firebird related (IMHO).

Non firebird specific thoughts

1. If you users ask you to code for outlook - run!!
2. If you can't then do a thorough research job and buy all kinds of
components and help you can get.
3. Beware of updates. Notify your customers that they con not expect to
update outlook without having to pay extra hours for adapting whatever
beast you wrote. Event an automatic update can f*ck thing up.

Firebird specific

OK. What I did generally was to use IBLogManager to log some updates to
my database. I then took inspiration from IBObjects DML caching and
wrote a service that runs on the server. This service responds to
firebird events that something has been updated. I then wrote some
intricate queries that take into account the las log id and spews out a
list of contacts that should be updated/deleted/inserted.

With distribution lists there are other and more intricate consideration.

This is a solution based on a number of considerations and being able to
handle quite large collections of addresses. Note that Outlook (or
actually IMAP) is a non-normalized storage protocol so for alla of us
who has been building normalized databases it needs some thought.

Anyway. There are other approaches to this problem. You could write a
plugin for outlook that lets you users select address information
directly from you database (http://www.add-in-express.com/ is a tool
that you could use). This was my preferred approach but the client wants
to use outlook's web ui so that one went :( Also that approach would
enable you to use your same code in word.

If you are working at an office as an IT-guru you could synchronize
manually every now and then. I believe I saw some commercial product to
that effect. That solution is entirely off-topic here. But would be much
easier to develop.

More off-topic is that Outlook 2003 (and later) can get its information
from a web-service so if you can write such that might be a path. I
dont know how that solution would handle big loads though.

I have been using OOM (Outlook Object Model) but using Extended IMAP
might be more prudent as such a solution might work wioth other group
software (GroupWise or such). There are two or three other "conduits"
that can be used with outlook - all of them having pros and cons.

HTH,

/Dany