Outlook is a personal information management (PIM) software application developed by Microsoft as part of the Office for Mac suite. Dialectic integrates with Outlook in a number of locations. If Outlook is installed on this machine, it will appear in several menus throughout the Dialectic interface (if it is not installed, if will not appear in these menus). The points of interaction between Outlook & Dialectic are:
- Lookup. You can specify Outlook as the source for the lookup feature (if Outlook is not launched when doing a lookup, Dialectic will open it).
- Missing called contact name lookup. If you dial a number without an associated name, Dialectic can use Outlook to search for the number and add the associated contact name (if applicable) for use with alerts & the Call Log. You can enable this option to automatically search for missing names in the dialing preferences or you can search for it after the call has been added to the Call Log by using the corresponding action in the Call Log action menu (if Outlook is not launched when doing this type of lookup, Dialectic will not open it).
- Caller ID lookup. When an incoming call is detected on a monitored device, Dialectic can search for the number of the incoming call to get the localized name of the associated contact using your data (if applicable). The name as entered in your Outlook database will be used for alerts & the Call Log.
- Dialing from Outlook. Using scripts available from the Dialectic Online Resources (http://www.jonn8.com/dialectic/resources/), you can dial directly from Outlook using either the selected contact or an incoming message from a contact whose phone number information is stored in the Outlook database.
- Notepad. The contents of the Dialectic Notepad can be sent to Outlook as a new note (see the action menu in the lower left corner of the Dialectic Notepad window).
- While You Were Out note. The contents of your While You Were Out notes can be sent to Outlook as a new note (see the action menu in the lower left corner of the Dialectic While You Were Out note window).
Interaction between Dialectic & Outlook could be further enhanced using AppleScript. For instance, when an incoming call is detected, Dialectic could run a script to open the associated contact record in Outlook (if available) and append an entry to the contact’s note field with the date & time of the incoming call.
