See what else is new…

A first preview of Lucatec^® Mask 3.1.1, a service release containing many of the same fixes as the 4.0.1 release, is now also available via the Update Check mechanism if you enable the option to check for preview and beta releases.

Lucatec^® Mask 4.0

You can now download and purchase or upgrade it from the usual places.

As for what’s new, we have once again pushed the Signature functionality to a new level, specifically the ability to use dynamic placeholders a.k.a. Signature Macros. With this release we give you…

Active Directory Integration

Using the two new macros UserDetail and SenderDetail you can now make signatures even more versatile, essentially enabling you to use a single, centrally stored set of signature files for all employees in your organization. Instead of hardcoding things like department name, phone numbers, job title, etc. you can now simply refer to the corresponding attributes of the Active Directory user object associated with the current user or the sender used for the current message respectively.

Of course that’s not all. Besides numerous minor fixes and improvements we’ve also added a couple of subtle usability enhancements.

“Alternative Target History”

If you occasionally need to save sent messages to a different folder than the one that is defined as the default for the relevant context so far, you had to browse for that folder every time. With Lucatec^® Mask 4.0 you only have to do this once: The next time you send a message from the same context (i.e. using the same sender) you will be able to simply pick the previously used alternative folder(s) from a dropdown list.

Enterprise-oriented Enhancements

We’ve also made some improvements that should benefit users who keep their Outlook sessions open for multiple days, weeks or even months, which is quite common for example when Outlook is actually running on a server rather than a physical workstation (e.g. Citrix/Terminal Server or VMware ESX Server). To this end, we’ve implemented an internal task scheduler: Tasks which the addin so far only performed on Outlook startup, most notably Signature Synchronization, will now be run in the background periodically (daily by default).

Furthermore, customers of the special Enterprise Edition will be happy to hear that it is now possible to enforce the contents of message signatures via a new option to always overwrite the local signatures with the external ones on synchronisation. Previously, this only happened when the external signatures were newer than the local ones, thus allowing users to individually customize their signatures.

Lucatec^® Mask 3.0.3 introduces “PolyGone” – a new feature that we will likely also make available as a separate product in the future (if you’re interested, drop us a note to speed up that process). It allows you to control the Out-of-Office state and auto-reply text of any additional mailboxes you might have in your current Outlook profile. In this first release this still takes an “all or nothing”-approach: When the relevant options are activated, the addin will make sure that the out-of-office status (and optionally the auto-reply text) of all additional mailboxes is always in sync with that of the primary mailbox. The current plan is to extend this in the future so that you will be able to configure this at the individual mailbox level and also to explicitly set the status and auto-reply text for mailboxes rather than just synchronizing it with the primary mailbox.

Another thing we put some work into was adding an alternative mechanism for monitoring the “Sent Items” folder for new items in need of moving. This is mainly to work around an issue that occurs when using Outlook 2003 to connect to an Exchange 2010 server with Cached Mode disabled. Unless you are working with a similar setup and your sent items do not get stored in the expected places, you should simply ignore this.

See what else is new…

It should also be mentioned that we released another service release for the Lucatec^® Mask 2.x product line, containing many of the bug fixes and stability improvements that were added while producing the new version 3.x releases.

Release History for Lucatec^® Mask 2.3.9

• Replied/Forwarded Status icons on items in Public Folders:
  This feature mimics Outlook’s behaviour in mailboxes: Items you forward or reply to will be marked with a corresponding icon. Please note that this feature requires that the user performing the Reply or Forward has to have the “Edit all” permission (implied by the permission levels “Editor” and above).
• Improved integration between “Sender Options” and “When replying or forwarding, use original recipient as sender”, i.e. when a sender has been determined by the latter mechanism, Lucatec^® Mask will now synchronize the target folder to that new sender based on the list of valid senders.

In this release, both new options are off by default and have to be enabled by adding corresponding entries to the registry. If you are interested in trying these out, please contact us directly for details. We expect these new options to be fully enabled and configurable via the regular configuration interface in the next release.

See what else is new…

Furthermore, we’ve recently registered a “Fan page” for Lucatec^® Mask on Facebook. We’d be happy to see as many of you become “fans” of the product as possible. Also, feel free to leave comments or questions in the discussion boards located there.

The really big news however is that we also have a brandnew major release!

Lucatec^® Mask 3.0

Effective immediately, Lucatec^® Mask 3.0.0 is available for download and purchase and it sports the following big new features:

Signature Enhancements

We’ve seriously tuned the signature insertion feature:

External Signature Synchronization

You can now put your team’s signature files on a network share and let Lucatec^® Mask automatically synchronize your local Outlook signatures with the external ones, thus allowing you to easily manage your team’s signatures in a central location.

Expandable Macros

To make those signatures even more versatile and resuable you can now also use expandable placeholders, e.g. to dynamically insert the name and address of the current user or even to include content from an external file, for instance a common legal disclaimer or rotating ads.

Default Naming Rules

Rather than adjusting the Folder Options of every single mailbox and Public Folder, you can now simply define a simple rule to determine the name of the signature to use. This can massively reduce the configuration effort: All you have to do is consistently name your signatures: For instance, inside a mailbox called “Support”, Lucatec^® Mask will by default try to insert a signature named “Support Signature”.

Enhanced integration with Outlook 2010

As already glimpsed in the previous blog entry Lucatec^® Mask 3.0.0 now fully integrates with Outlook 2010′s new Backstage View, thus allowing you quicker access to Lucatec^® Mask‘s configuration. So far we are quite happy with the new experience. How about you?

Multi-language user interface

The language of the user interface can now be switched at runtime. Also, multiple languages are supported by a single installation. This is especially useful in multi-user environments like Citrix- or Terminal Server.

We’ve also already prepared the system for integrating user-supplied translations. If you’re interested in translating Lucatec^® Mask into your language: Get in touch!

Stay tuned as we update the site with more details about the new version in the coming weeks.

We thought some of you might notice a couple of interesting things in this screenshot of Outlook 2010…
(click to view full-size version).

Feel free to comment!

Today we are happy to share with you some preliminary results of our testing Lucatec^® Mask 2.3.2 (build 441) with the Technical Preview build of the upcoming Microsoft Outlook 2010. First off: All of the addin’s core functionality (i.e. setting senders, moving sent items and inserting signatures, all based on context) already works as expected. So it is generally already possible to use Lucatec^® Mask with the new Outlook 2010.

It should also be noted however, that as was to be expected not everything works right out of the box yet, all because of some major changes in the Outlook user interface. Most notably the From field is no longer a simple text field but has become its own thing entirely (see screenshot to the right) which currently prevents Lucatec^® Mask from visually updating the sender name (i.e. the displayed From value does not reflect the sender that will actually be used). Furthermore, because of significant changes in the way that addin option pages are integrated with the other Outlook options, setting up signature insertion is a bit fiddly with the current build. Drop us a note if you want to play a little yourself and need assistance for getting things working.

Needless to say that we will make sure these glitches are resolved before or shortly after the final release of Microsoft Office 2010. So far we are pleasantly surprised with the latest Office package and do not expect any major holdups in providing full compatibility.

973404 : Description of the Outlook 2007 hotfix package (Outlook.msp): August 25, 2009

Even though the latest releases of Lucatec^® Mask already contain a partial workaround for the issue fixed by this update, it is strongly recommended that all customers using Outlook 2007 SP2 install this hotfix package to reestablish completely correct functionality of Microsoft Outlook 2007 regarding sender data stored in Sent Items.

The hotfix package quoted above is part of the Office 2007 Cumulative Update for August 2009. You can find descriptions of hotfix packages for other Office components also included in the August cumulative update in the following article:

974982 : Office 2007 Cumulative Update for August 2009

Customers with a Microsoft support contract of their own can contact us for reference information that should allow them to get access to the hotfix preview by filing a new incident.