General Discussion - Citrix or Application? Email Functionality

Author

Citrix or Application? Email Functionality

jhermiz

2001-11-14, 1:03 pm

Developed application in access 2k using win2k but this application now resides on our citrix server

the problem is as follows:

Been working on an open issues database to replace an existing poorly designed database that our company has been using. Everything is finally complete except one minor thing. The application works fine but one thing doesnt work the way we want it to work, and we now need to spend our nickel for consulting or help.

The application is written in Access along with VBA, ActiveX, and Outlook.

Now heres the thing...I've got a button on an access form which is used to send an e-mail in the form of a task to a responsible person based on some information in the records. I dont wanna bore you with all the information so its a whole bunch of things that pull out a responsible person based on a customer commission and a site. In any event once this task is sent the user or the assignee has the option to decline or accept the task via outlook. If the task is accepted it goes into the assignee's task list in outlook, and if it is declined an e-mail is sent back to the original person who sent the task informing them that the task is declined. This process is done automatically by outlook. All fine and dandy over regular network running windows. I'm guessing and am not sure that outlook knows which profile to open up based on an NT login. Since it uses the local clients outlook application. I for one am no guru at this. Now the problem lies within our citrix server. See we want to deploy this application over a winframe server so that our sites can dial in over the VPN and use this database application. Someone logs in fills out a record and sends a task to a responsible person. Now this task's from field is labeled with the only account on the citrix server called, Open Issues, although I am logged into my citrix session with my same profile as NT network login. Now there must be some way via outlook objects, via access, or via something to get the actual NT profile's client to be used when sending this tasked email. The reason I ask this is because anyone who sends a tasked email will have in the from field OpenIssues, so the assignee will never know who it came from. To complicate things even more this task email maybe accepted or declined like I previously said. If it is declined it simply gets sent back to the "Open Issues" email account. Anyone logging into the citrix server and opening outlook sees all the tasks and emails sent back and forth since there is only one mail account. I need to find somehow someway to set it up so that it uses profiling like windows NT to use the local client's outlook. So that when I send an email in citrix than my name appears in the from field. This is quite complicated since we do not know where to look whether outlook citrix or access. We certainly cannot create a ton of new email accounts over our citrix server, namely because we have over 400 employess and also its citrix session so it works off the server so I dont know if its possible. Anyhow like I said we really need to get some consulting, help, or possibly a solution. I hope I'm not being too off on this, but it is quite difficult to explain, I'd be more than willing to explain a little more if needed. Thanks and greatly appreciated.

Must be some way to not just have one account such as, "OpenIssues", isnt there a way to link to the microsoft exchange server like our regular network...maybe im digging too deep...but I dont know how to approach this.

Nicole

2001-11-14, 3:12 pm

quote:
All fine and dandy over regular network running windows. I'm guessing and am not sure that outlook knows which profile to open up based on an NT login. Since it uses the local clients outlook application. I for one am no guru at this. Now the problem lies within our citrix server.

I don't think the profile issues matter, assuming you are using Exchange. Exchange will hand the message/task to the user's mailbox on the server. When or wherever the user is logged on next, they'll get it. If they can log onto Exchange Server from their remote computer, they're fine.

Caveat: I don't know a darned thing about Citrix or VPNs.

But if the problem were to be with Access, check your script for the button to send the mail. Do your users log onto the Access database? If so, I think you could link their database logon to their Exchange account as the "From" field. (Unless you have connectivity issues with Citrix and your Exchange Server.)

Something to think about :
From what you describe it sounds like Access is the wrong database for the job, except as a front end client application to a backend server. 400 employees? Egad, I wouldn't want to use Access for more than 20 or 30 users... and the general rule of thumb is absolutely no more than 50. SQL Server is probably the better option for your backend -- it's cheap, scalable, and your existing Access application can be tailored pretty easily to switch to SQL Server. Once you start adding people accessing from multiple locations Access can really bog down unless you have a VERY few users. Like 5 or 6. I'd think long and hard about locking and performance issues while you are doing the current upgrade. It'll be cheaper (and easier to get the funding!) to upgrade to SQL Server now than it will be a couple of months down the road when everyone is complaining about database performance.

jhermiz

2001-11-15, 5:59 am

Not all 400 employees are using this, only 25 and those 25 are not concurrent users. Access, is the job for this application, I've been developing db's for quite some time and an Open Issues database certainly doesn't need to be implemented with an SQL server backend. It's possible of course, but not worth the time or the money. In any event, the arguments in access to create a task do not allow for setting the from field, at least I havent found any...thats why I cant change the from field. Thanks

Nicole

2001-11-15, 9:59 am

I did not mean to disparage your database skills by any means. But you mentioned 400 people and I thought I would bring up the issue just in case

I suggest also asking over on comp.databases.ms-access, and be sure to post the relevant portion of your code. If there is a "from" parameter (other than the td.connect=<profile name> ), or otherwise a code problem, I'd bet one of the guys on there would know. There are several extremely knowledgable folks on that newsgroup.

jhermiz

2001-11-15, 1:57 pm

figured it out it was just changing the code along with adding "OpenIssues" as a delegate to my Win NT network account.

Sponsored Links