Knowledge Base

OL2000: (CW) Outlook Voting and Vote Processing

Article ID: 197420

Article Last Modified on 10/9/2003

Microsoft Outlook 2000 Standard Edition

This article was previously published under Q197420

NOTE: These procedures only apply if you have installed Outlook with the Corporate Workgroup/Other option. This option allows you to use Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) services. To determine your installation type, on the Help Menu, click About Microsoft Outlook. In About Microsoft Outlook, you should see "Corporate" if you have the Corporate Workgroup installation.

SUMMARY

You can send survey-type messages with voting buttons to a group of recipients. By clicking a button, each respondent can express a preference and generate a response message to vote. Outlook logs Vote messages to the original message's tracking page. This article describes the conditions and requirements for proper operation of the Voting feature.

NOTE: The voting feature is not available with the Internet Mail Only (IMO) version of Outlook.

MORE INFORMATION

For the Voting feature to work, both the message sender and the message recipient must be using Outlook. It also depends upon the setting of certain options in Outlook, and the proper handling of the incoming Vote messages.

How to Generate Voting Messages

From the Inbox folder, on the Actions menu, click New Mail Message.
On the View menu, click Options, and under Voting and Tracking Options, click Use Voting Buttons.
Click to select one of the predefined option sets or type your own set of options, separating each by a semi-colon (;). Each of these option items will be the title of a voting button on the message received.
Click Close.
Click the message area, complete the survey message, and then click Send.

Processing Vote Response Messages

Outlook either manually or automatically logs the incoming Vote messages to the original message in the Sent Items folder on its tracking page.

Manual Logging of Vote Messages

Opening or deleting a Vote message logs it to the tracking page. However, deletion of the Vote message by an Inbox rule will not log the message.

Automatic Logging of Vote Messages

The following conditions are required for automatic processing of Vote messages:

The sent message must remain in the default Sent Items folder.
The Vote message must remain in the default Inbox.
There must be 30 to 60 seconds of idle time on your computer before the automatic processing will activate. Any keyboard or mouse movement will interrupt this idle time.
Outlook must be running.

You Must Select Automatic Processing Options

On the Tools menu, click Options, click E-mail Options,, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.
Click to select Process requests and responses on arrival, and then click OK.
Click Tracking Options, click to select Delete receipts and blank responses after processing, click OK, click OK again, and then click OK again.

These options automatically log votes to the sent message's Tracking page, and then delete them if they have no text entered by the respondent.

For additional information about message tracking, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

195797 OL2000: (CW) How to Sort Tracking Information

Additional query words: How to

Keywords: kbinfo KB197420