Finally, we have arrived at the end of a development cycle, and it's time to summarize the challenges the team encountered while developing the LitCrit enhancements to the Corporate Media Library. Many of our challenges were related to developing the application using Microsoft® Exchange Server.
The Microsoft Outlook® Forms Designer user interface is enmeshed with the UI of the form you are designing. Because of this, it is very easy to make an adjustment to the Forms Designer interface that ends up changing the form layout UI as well. We learned that it is a good idea to fully design the form before you start to implement it. Having a good idea of what needs to be done before you launch the designer will help you finish the job more quickly and with less frustration.
Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) was also a challenge to work with. The scripting logic of the form was lost during the HTML conversion process, so it took several days of poring through the resulting ASP script to discover the least intrusive methods of retrofitting the logic back in. The most surprising lesson came in the form of anonymous vs. authenticated logins—we simply could not do both in the context of the same session. For this release at least, we resigned ourselves to a form that would work for our basic usage scenarios, but one that is severely limited when used from OWA itself.
So once again, the BackOffice® Developer's Guide presents the lessons learned as the CML/LitCrit sample application was written. These lessons can be grouped into the following categories: