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All of our users utilize Enhanced Email Out (EEO) functionality within Dovetail. When we moved from Office 2003 to 2007 we found that the present version of CDO did not work with Outlook 2007. Luckily CDO 1.2.1 was released within a few months. Now that Office 2010 has hit the shelf we are again faced with an issue. If you try to install CDO 1.2.1 you will get the message Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1 cannot be installed unless Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 is also installed. This is due to an installer condition. However a new version of CDO will not be released for Outlook 2010. Instead they included most of the functionality within Office to deprecate CDO. This requires each application to be rewritten to use this new object model. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692174(office.14).aspx and search for CDO 1.21 Not Supported for Outlook 2010 for more details. So once again Microsoft has thrust upon us yet another predicament. Don’t get me wrong. I love working with Microsoft technologies and hold several Microsoft certifications. But these tactics gravely impact users and partners alike. How can they expect partners to abruptly change gears and rewrite their software in this manner? As customers purchase new systems they have to install older versions of software until such time as the applications are rewritten and tested to support this new object model.

HOWEVER, I have never been one to ”Go Gentle into That Good Night”  - it’s a developer thing. In this article I will explain how to add CDO functionality for Outlook 2010. This will at least buy us all time to catch up to where Microsoft wants us to be. Of course by that time they will have most likely made a course correction and put us once more gasping for air. Luckily the library will work with Outlook 2010 and I will explain how to accomplish this.

First you need the following files from a working install of CDO 1.2.1. These are located on a x32 OS at C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033 and on a x64 OS at C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033.

CDO.DLL

GAPI32.DLL

License.rtf

On a computer that already has Office 2010 installed copy the above three files to C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033 for a x64 OS. If you are working with a x32 OS place them in C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033. You should already have a file named MSMAPI32.DLL located in this folder that was installed during the Ms Office installation. Leave it alone. Now open a Command Prompt from the Accessories start menu group by right clicking and choosing Run as administrator from the context menu. This is very important. If you do not run as administrator registration will fail due to lack of permissions. From the command prompt navigate to the path where you placed the three files and type regsvr32 CDO.DLL and enter. Now launch Dovetail and setup and test your CDO installation.

I took this one step farther. Since we have a number of users all over the world and more than just Dovetail that utilizes CDO I created an installer using Visual Studio 2010 so the end users could install this without intervention from the IT staff. You could use any installer program to create an .msi file just remember to set CDO.DLL to self register. In Visual Studio this is vsdrfCOMSelfReg.

Hope this helps.