Launching Office applications from Sharepoint

My apologies for not posting this last month, I'm pretty busy with a new customer. But I found some time to share my experiences again ;)

As the title suggests, my last challenge was to launch Office applications from Sharepoint. This new customer wanted to use Sharepoint not only as a portal to find information but also to launch it's applications. I knew that Sharepoint was capable to launch the default Office applications like Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But the question was, how to launch Outlook? I tried everything from dirty javascript code to creating a custom webpart which launches the outlook process, nothing worked. Fortunatly Daniel McPherson was in my msn list and he knew the answer. He said 'try using the outlook:// protocol', i was flabbergasted because it worked immediatly ;) Copy and paste this code into a CEWP webpart and voila, you can launch Office apps from Sharepoint

<a href="javascript:OpenWord()">Word</a>
<a href="javascript:OpenExcel()">Excel</a>
<a href="javascript:OpenPowerPoint()">Powerpoint</a>
<a href="outlook://inbox">Outlook</a>

<script>

function OpenWord()
{

    var strTemplate = "Word.Document.8";
    var strSaveLocation = "http://intranet";
    var strProgID = "SharePoint.OpenDocuments";
    createNewDocumentWithProgID(strTemplate, makeAbsUrl(strSaveLocation), strProgID, false);

}

function OpenExcel()
{

    var strTemplate = "Excel.Sheet.8";
    var strSaveLocation = "http://intranet";
    var strProgID = "SharePoint.OpenDocuments";
    createNewDocumentWithProgID(strTemplate, makeAbsUrl(strSaveLocation), strProgID, false);

}


function OpenPowerPoint()
{

    var strTemplate = "PowerPoint.Show.8";
    var strSaveLocation = "http://intranet";
    var strProgID = "SharePoint.OpenDocuments";
    createNewDocumentWithProgID(strTemplate, makeAbsUrl(strSaveLocation), strProgID, false);

}

</script>