November 14, 2011

Lucatec MASK 4.0.0 released!

We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of our latest major release!

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

$$UserDetail$$ Signature Macro in Action

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.

Lucatec MASK Message Options showing the Target History dropdown list in action

“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.

May 26, 2011

Lucatec MASK 3.0.3 and 2.3.9 released!

These last two months we’ve been busy with (among other things) implementing some customer-requested features. The result of this work is now available to the public (actually, a release candidate has already been available for a couple of weeks via MASK’s Update Check option).

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

March 29, 2011

Lucatec® MASK 3.0.1 released!

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of a new Service Release, Lucatec® Mask 3.0.1. Besides a number of bugfixes this release contains two experimental new features for advanced users to try:

  • Replied/Forwarded Status icons on items in Public Folders:
    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…