Question

I came by this page and was thinking about the best method to distribute my VbaProject.OTM file (located into %appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook\) to a bunch of ~30 users at my office. Is it better to simply copy/paste the OTM file onto the network and then copy/paste it back to all users’ computers (manually or with a .bat) OR would it be better to use the method described in the link above to generate a OPS file and import it back with Proflwiz.exe? What’s the difference?

We are all on Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 actually, we might upgrade to 2007 one day but still years from now.

Answer 1

Finally came up with some elements to deploy a Outlook VBA Project. There are a lot of ways to do this, but the easiest way to do so without installing anything and keeping the same methodology would be to run a OTM file directly from a server. I found out that the process outlook.exe has a parameter altvba that allows to specify another path to run the OTM file from. Here is en example:

outlook.exe /altvba "\\myServer\myFolder\myFile.otm"

This allows me to update only one file to get all computers updated. Obviously, if the file is big and the server’s ping is on the high side, it may delay the launch of Outlook. The other problem with this method is that everybody will have to shut down Office if you want to update the OTM file on the server (and if you do work in an office where everyone uses Outlook, you do know that it is impossible to get everyone to shut it down at the same time, except if you code a macro to do so eventually). To prevent both those problems, I could setup a batch file to copy the server OTM file clientside everytime there is a new version (just have to check the NTFS last-modify attribute). This way, Outlook will boot with a local file, the batch file take 2-3 seconds to copy the file if needed (or will launch Outlook instantaneously) and there will be no problem updating the OTM file on the server. Users will have to start Outlook with the batch file (or with the slightly different outlook.exe path with the altvba parameter, so either way they need a different shortcut/file to start off the first time). One other advantage of the altvba is that it’s still easy for the user to run Outlook without it (to see if the VBA is problematic or not in case Outlook is sluggish) and the file will remain unchanged after a Outlook reinitialization.

Others solutions include a COM complement that can be developed in a lot on languages including VB6 (no conversion needed from VBA). There is also a bunch of tools included into Microsoft Office XP Developer that could help getting the job done (not free however, especially if you need the most up-to-date version).