The program introduces the term of public and private categories. Public categories are defined
in an external configuration file and are common to all users on the network. Private categories
are the categories added in Outlook locally by a user and they are only visible for that user (
Fig.1).
On the list of categories a user can see both his own private categories and the public categories. All the time the Outlook client is open, the program monitors the public categories file. When one of the public categories is added, deleted or modified, the list of Outlook categories is updated respectively.
The program features a category editor in which the user can conveniently edit private and public categories (
Fig.1).
The administrator can define which users can modify them by setting write access rights to the file containing public categories.
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Fig.1. Private and public category editor.
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Fig.2. The program settings are available directly in Outlook options.
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How it works
Once the program is installed, start Outlook, go to
Tools |
Options, open the
CodeTwo CatMan tab and
type the path to the configuration file, containing the list of public categories (
Fig.2). If the file does not
exist, it will be created once you click the
Category editor button.
After clicking the
Category editor button, the editor window will open (
Fig.3) which
you can use to edit the public categories, shared with other users on the network, and private
categories which are only visible on the current machine.
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Fig.3. Private and public category editor.
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You can quickly open the
Category editor clicking the
CodeTwo CatMan button, located on the
main Outlook toolbar (
Fig.4).
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Fig.4. You can quickly start Category editor from the Outlook toolbar.
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By setting according access rights for writing to the public category file, you can choose users on the local
network who will be able to modify the list of public categories. If a user has no permission to modify the
public categories, s/he will be notified by the program (
Fig.5).
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Fig.5. By setting according access rights to the configuration file, you can choose users who will be able to modify the list of public categories.
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The program automatically synchronizes all public categories defined in the configuration file with the
list of categories in your Outlook client. If a category is removed from the file, it will also be removed
from the Outlook list of categories. This way you can work both with public and private categories in Outlook (
Fig.6).
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Fig.6. The Outlook category list displays both the public and private categories.
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(applies to Outlook 2003 and previous versions only)
If you've never edited the default list of Outlook categories, please do this now. Otherwise the current default categories will be removed. Open the list of categories and add any category to the list. Once the list is saved, you can delete that category.
Requirements
Microsoft Outlook 98 / 2000 / 2002 / 2003 / 2007
Operating system: Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista
Download and use for free (0.7 MB)
If you are looking for software to share data between Outlook clients on the local network,
read about CodeTwo Public Folders.