Outlook and Access question

[lonesoac0]

Hello all,

I have a software license database that is in Access. People send me emails all the time to query my DB for software keys. What I would like to do is to make an auto query and response in my outlook and access apps. The workflow I see is the following:

1. co-worker sends me an email asking for userids' license keys.
2. My outlook see's a certain phrase in the subject and runs a query in my access db.
3. An automatic reply sends back the information to the sender.



Can this be done relatively easily?

[gmayor]

The short answer is yes it can be done, but easily?

You would need a function to access the database table and grab the ID associated with the user's name. That is fairly straightforward, provided the username field contains unique information (or you can derive unique information from interrogating more than one field) and you know the column(s) that contain(s) the unique data and the column number of the field containing the License key.

What is more difficult, unless you provide a standard format for the co-worker to send you the identity of the user, is reading the message to grab the user information so that it can be used to interrogate the database.

Sending the reply part is easy and can be done from a rule, provided the Outlook macro has access to all the data it requires.

Although intended for a different purpose, my website link http://www.gmayor.com/extract_data_from_email.htm shows how to read an e-mail message. What you need to do is ensure that message is readable, then the rest will fall into place.