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Microsoft Outlook is a great tool for organizing your emails, contacts, tasks, appointment and a heck of a lot of other stuff. MissingLink adds that extra functionality which allows you to manage and coordinate your projects.

In this article I will explain how you set up MissingLink Professional to allow you to collaborate and share your project data with other members of your team. MissingLink Professional works best in a LAN environment, which for most non-technical users can be described as people you share an office with.

You’ll need to have a bit of technical knowledge around setting up a network share but that should be about it. In this scenario, I’ll describe how three fictional users, Gary, Joan and Steve, can connect MissingLink Professional in their office and work together to share project data.

Setting Up the Server

1. Each users must install MissingLink Professional on their PC.
2. Although MissingLink Professional can share data in a peer to peer capacity, it is best to decide that one user will become the “server” and it will be their MissingLink database that contains the project data. In this case, Gary’s instance of MissingLink will be our “server”.
3. Gary must create a network share on his computer. (Now for the technical part). Gary opens up his Windows Explorer and navigates to his C: drive. He creates a folder on his computer named “MissingLink DB”. In his Windows Explorer he see the following: “C:\MissingLink DB”. Gary then presses his right-mouse button on the “C:\MissingLink DB” folder and goes to “Sharing and Security”. From there, Gary select the “Share this folder on the network” check box and sets the share name to MissingLink DB.
4. Gary now runs Microsoft Outlook and needs to “move” his MissingLink database to the “C:\MissingLink DB” folder that he create in step #3.
5. On the MissingLink Toolbar (Outlok 2003/2007) or the MissingLink Ribbon (Outlook 2010), Gary selects to bring up the MissingLink Dashboard.
6. Gary then presses the right-mouse button on his Project tree and goes to the Database option.



7. Gary then selects the “Move Database Location” option



8. Gary will then be prompted with the “Browse For Folder” dialog and he navigates to the “C:\MissingLink DB” folder that he created in step #3.



9. When he has completed the move he should see the following successful message.

Setting Up Users

At this point, Gary’s work is almost complete, he needs to setup MissingLink User Accounts for both Joan and Steve. To setup Users, Gary needs to do the following:

1. If Gary was running Outlook 2003/2007 he would go the MissingLink menu item and select Database Users. In Outlook 2010, Gary would select it via the MissingLink Ribbon



2. Gary then needs to go through and add both Joan and Steve to the database.



3. It is important at this point to note that there is one more step to enable access for users. When a project is created, the “Users” tab will indicate which users can access the project.

Connecting Users to MissingLink

At this point, most of the hard work is complete. Now Joan and Steve need to “Connect” their local instances MissingLink to Gary’s MissingLink. Both Joan and Steve will follow these steps:

1. From the MissingLink Dashboard, press the right-mouse button on the Project tree to bring up the Database option.



2. From the Database option, select the Connect item.



3. You will then be prompted with standard Window dialog Open. This is where things will also get a little technical. You need to know what Gary’s PC name is. For the sake of this article, we’ll call it Gary. To figure out what your PC name is you’ll need to go to your PC Properties and the Computer Name tab



4. You’ll then type in the network share that Gary created in Step #3 of “Creating the Server”. For the sake of this article, it will look like the following \\Gary\MissingLink DB and in the Share, you should see Gary’s MissingLink database. If you select that database and press the Open button, you should be prompted with a login to MissingLink.



5. Here is where you would enter the User ID and Password information that was set up previously. Clicking on the Login button will connect to the MissingLink Database on Gary’s PC and allow Joan, Steve and Gary to all work together to collaborate and share project data.

Something to note:

• MissingLink will remember the database connection information so you shouldn’t have to re-login every day or re-connect to the remote database.

Hopefully this article clarifies and explains how to set up MissingLink Professional in a network environment. If you have any questions, please drop me an email to kevin at missinglinkprojectcenter dot com.

Kevin

Hi,

It has taken longer than I had hoped but I’ve just update the website with the latest version of MissinLink.

You should be notified automatically of the update.

Drop me an email to kevin at missinglinkprojectcenter dot com if you have any questions or comments.

Kevin

Hi,

First off, a very Happy Thanksgiving to all !! It is a big American holiday today and I wanted to send well wishes to my American friends, customers and everybody else too!

I know that this blog hasn’t been updated very much in the last 6 months or so, things have been pretty hectic in my life and I haven’t had the time to dedicate to MissingLink as I would have liked. That being said, I’ve found some free time in the last few weeks and I’ve been working on some stuff:

1. I found and fixed a couple of nagging bugs and will continue to debug and work on the system.

2. I’ve added an Outlook 2010 Ribbon to the system so my Outlook 2010 users should now be able to access the full functionality of MissingLink from a Ribbon.

3. I’ve added some logic so that embedded attachments (usually signature files), won’t be added to the system. This one took me a while and I ended up using a new plug-in named Redemption that helped greatly! Thanks a bunch to the developer of that tool!

I plan on bundling up these changes and releasing an update over the weekend.

Please drop me a note a kevin at MissingLinkProjectcenter dot com if you have any comments

Regards,

Kevin

Wow, I can’t believe so much time has passed since I last posted on this blog!

There have been a number of big changes that have gone on in my life, the biggest being a few weeks ago I got married. As you might have guessed, the last few months leading up to the wedding were pretty stressful and hectic. The ceremony went well and we’ve settled down into our married life.

I plan on rededicating some time to MissingLink and continuing improvements, enhancements and bug fixes to the system. If you have any comments or concerns, please send me an email.

Regards,
Kevin

This post is rather timely for me because last week, while doing some debugging and testing, I inadvertently lost a lot of data. Because it caused me a lot of grief, it occurred to me that some good could come of it and that is where this post is coming from.

In this day and age, with technology being as pervasive as it is, it is easy to forget how much we rely on our PCs. If you are anything like me, you use your PC or Mac everyday for a wide variety of tasks, often taking for granted that everything will be there and it will work without incident.

Let me walk you through a scenario; you get up, get ready for the day and proceed to your office, with coffee or tea in hand. You turn on your PC or wake it up and staring at you instead of an expected log in screen is a message that says your hard disk has crashed.

After spending several hours trying to get the PC to boot, you are left with nothing. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the hard disk is toast, gone, kaput. Your only solution is to buy a replacement. That’s ok, you think, you’ve got all those pretty CDs from Microsoft or your other software vendors, you’ll be back up in running in a matter of minutes

And then … your stomach does a few turns because you realize that while you have all of the programs, you don’t have the data, the work, the important stuff.

You see it is rather easy to reinstall a program, but what about the documents, spreadsheets, files? Those are the things that cannot be reinstalled unless you have a good backup.

If you are like me, you have other important things on your PC, pictures or movies of your family. These are the really important things, because if they are gone, they cannot be recreated. Those usually represent a snapshot of time, when your child takes their first walk, a first Christmas or maybe a school play.

These memories are priceless and if you are like me, you probably haven’t backed them up. So, what I would like is for you to take some time, maybe a few hours, buy some blank CDs or DVD and backup all your important data; your files, pictures, movies and other important information, because if it goes away, it will be gone forever.

You should do this regularly but doing it at least once is critical! There is a lot of software on the Internet that can do regularly scheduled backups for you but even before any of that happens, please, please backup your stuff!

Hello,

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish you and your family and very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Season’s Greetings to all!

Kevin

Hi,

After much consideration I have decided to increase the price of MissingLink Project Managment from it’s current price of $49 to $79 effective December 15th, 2009.

This price increase reflects what I feel is an increase in the value that you will receive from MissingLink Project Management.

If you have any comments, please feel free to drop me an email.

Kevin

Hi,

I’ve created a new Youbundle page that can help people that are managing projects using Microsoft Outlook.

You can find more information here: http://www.youbundle.com/b/outlook-project-management

Kevin

Hi everyone,

First off let me apologize as it has been quite some time since I’ve updated this blog. I have been working hard on getting a new update out to the system and it has taken up a lot of my time.

That being said, I’d like to announce a rather large update to the system. Specifically one change I’ve made is that I’ve replaced our internal database engine. The old database engine was Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition (CE) and the new engine is called Vista DB. You can find more information about Vista DB from their web-site: Vista DB.

The main reasons for changing back end databases is due to a coupe of limitations that Microsoft has artificially imposed on SQL Server CE. The two main issues that affected my customers were limiting the size of the database to 4 Gb and not allowing for networked connection. The first issue I could have gotten around by allowing my users to create secondary and tertiary databases to store information. That could have been problematic but I could have worked around it. The bigger issue of the two dealt with networked access. I am planning on releasing a complementary version of MissingLink that will allow you to connect to another users database across your LAN. This wouldn’t have been possibly with SQL Server CE so I started looking for new back end databases.

I heard some great reviews about Vista DB and downloaded their trail version and gave it a serious look. Initially it seemed like a great solution because it acted as a direct replacement to SQL Server CE with little code changes. It also removed the requirement of having databases smaller than 4GB and allows for networked access. After some thorough testing I decided to make the switch and I’m happy to report that everything transitions quite nicely.

I’m hoping that my users won’t notice any change and the old saying “no news is good news” would be a good solution in this case.

On an entirely related note I’ve made some other changes that are more visible to my users:

1. I’ve created the ability for my users to create sub-tasks on their task list. This will allow my users to categorize and “nest” tasks to further clarify what needs to be done. To the best of my knowledge this can’t be done with Outlook currently, so I’m quite excited to be able to offer this functionality.

2. You can also re-adjust the order of your tasks in how you’d like to accomplish them. There is now a “Move Task Up” and “Move Task Down” menu item that will control the order in which a task is displayed the grid.

3. The bigger impact item that a number of users have requested is easier access to Files stored within MissingLink. Now on the File popup menu you have the ability to select “Open File”. This will take the latest version of the file stored in the database and “run” that file and allow you to make changes to it without. Also if you double-click on a file you’ll be presented with a window allowing you to either open the MissingLink file information or “run” that file directly. I’m hoping this makes your file changes easier to accomplish.

As you can see there are a lot of changes with this release. If you come across and bugs or problems, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email.

And a big Happy Thanksgiving to my American users.

All the best,

Kevin

Hi,

I’ve just added a new Testimonial page to the web-site. This page will be testimonials given for how MissingLink add values to Microsoft Outlook.

You can find it here: Testimonials