Dean mailed me. He has written a product called OWANotify and was trying to add more features to it. He asked:
Is there a URL for any version of OWA 2000/2003/2007 that can bring me straight to my current calendar and task reminders? I’ve only managed to find the url for the empty dlg_reminders modal window (/?Cmd=dialog&template=dlg_reminders), but that of course is unpopulated.
I’ve looked under every rock and every leaf and I thought I was really close when I found the trick to open up the calendar as a webpart. But that trail was a dead end too; no mentions of reminder dialogs.
Wow, I had no idea. I asked Ewan who didn’t think that this could be done, but suggested I kept on digging, so I asked around the product team. Unfortunately there is no supported way to link to the OWA reminders dialog. The web parts are the only URL entry points we document/test/support integration with. Also, I don’t think there’s a direct URL for opening reminders… as far as I know, the reminders “window” isn’t a separate URL at all, it’s just a Jscript popup.
I think that the best way to do this on Exchange 2007 would be to programmatically the web services interface, but even then I’m not sure if there’s a list of all current reminders… see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204119.aspx for some extra information here.
I hate it when I’ve got to mail someone and say that we don’t have a good answer, or things are not going to work as they want to but Dean was actually delighted.
Thanks for getting this info for me. There’s always a silver lining to every cloud and this is no exception!Getting this info straight from you and your team settles my theory once and for all. I don’t need to keep scouring the internet for something that doesn’t exist!
If you can believe it, I’ve read the stuff you sent me from the product team many times over just to make sure I didn’t miss anything!
Since Exch2007 still exposes WebDAV calls (although deprecated) I’ll probably craft a calendar & tasks reminders solution using that instead of the services. This way owanotify reminders will work for exch2003 users as well.
Well Dean stopped his quest for the answer and is now happy – all becaus I said that there wasn’t an answer. So sometimes saying no actually is the best thing to do…
