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Trouble with Live Search Maps Add-in for Outlook

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Several million of you have downloaded the Live Search Maps Add-in for Outlook which allows integration in Outlook with maps and has some cool functionality around extending your appointment blocks to account for automatically calculated travel time among other things.

We have received a large number of support cases that are caused either directly or indirectly because of this add-in. These include hangs, crashes, and leaks. There could be any number of different reasons for those, but to name one culprit, the add-in interops with CDO 1.21, which if you are a messaging developer following the blogs of anyone on our team, you will know that this is not supported.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/266353

Worse than that, it is distributing CDO.dll, which is also not supported. https://support.microsoft.com/kb/171440

A customer of mine reported an issue that lead us to another discovery. The add-in installs a custom form to your Personal forms registry and changes the default form for the calendar to IPM.Appointment.Location. The form it publishes is based on the LEO.oft form that it installs in your Program Files. The OFT was clearly customized from an existing item in the designer’s mailbox. The form contains a value for PR_START_DATE and PR_END_DATE set to 4/6/2006. The problem with this is that Outlook doesn’t use PR_START_DATE and PR_END_DATE, but CDO 1.21 does and OWA will set them as well. Outlook uses custom named props to keep track of dates.  Exchange normally keeps these custom props and PR_START/END_DATE in sync, but only if it needs to because of a modification you did from OWA or something like that. Otherwise, the original values will stick.

If you have a CDO 1.21 application which filters based on a date, all the appointments you created with this form in your calendar will appear to be on 4/6/2006.

The long-term plan for what to do about all the problems in this add-in has not been determined at the time of writing of this blog, but it may result in the download being removed from microsoft.com. This won’t help you fix up any items that already exist in your calendar though – nor will it prevent users from using the add-in if they already have it downloaded and installed.

If you insist on continuing to use the add-in, then please at least use this updated form.

You will need to publish this form to your Personal Forms library over the original. If you uncomfortable with that, you can

  1. Uninstall the add-in using Add/Remove Programs.
  2. Remove the existing form from your Personal forms library,
  3. Close Outlook and ensure no instances of Outlook.exe are running in Task Manager.
  4. Reinstall the add-in,
  5. Replace the LEO.oft in the Program Files folder (C:\Program Files\Live Search Maps for Outlook) with the one contained in the ZIP file linked above.
  6. Open Outlook. (the add-in will publish your new form).

This should allow your CDO 1.21 code to execute normally on any newly created items. For existing items, you can use Outlook Object Model or CDO 1.21 (or Extended MAPI) code to loop through the appointments in your calendar and delete the PR_START_DATE and PR_END_DATE properties if they are on 4/6/2006 with a message class of IPM.Appointment.Location. Outlook should still be able to work with the appointment just fine without those properties.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 24, 2008
    Gee, thanks for this post! I also installed this and was unable to continue using it for long. I thought it had overwritten the wrong dll, but I didn't have time to see for myself. Thanks for describing the issue so clearly:) I hope that a working version of this addin will come along some day. People really really like it... Even a few of those awful Mac users have commented on how cool it looks. I really think an add-in that encouraged said Mac user to see the light about buying Microsoft Office is worth a little more development time, don't you? (OK, yeah, it got him interested, but PowerPoint was the Decider.)

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2008
    I have not had trouble with the add-in and would like to reinstall it after having to reinstall Windows on my computer.  Where can I locate the leo executable file?

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2009
    Is there another option to "automatically" add "travel time" before and after appointment in outlook - without needing to add additional appointments??? Please let me know.  

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2009
    I used the Live Maqp to schedule drive time and apointment until this morning... Now, Live Maps seems to be DEAD...No Maps come up, and "get Directions" no longer works... The Link to "Live Search" is still there, but none of the links to Outlook option work... Any idea what is going on?? Bob@inspectionsbybob.com

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    Is there an updated location for the LEO.ZIP file containing the LEO.OFT file? Also, a note here http://geothought.blogspot.com/2009/01/mysterious-disappearance-of-microsoft.html provides instructions to update the existing plugin to use the curent Java version of Live Search Maps

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2009
    The comment has been removed