Linking an email and event in Apple OSX

In this, I showed how easy it is to link an email and calendar event in Lotus Notes using document links on Apple OSX.

You can do something similar with Apple's mail and calendar application, but I find the feature less mature than it is in Notes.

Email messages in mail.app have message IDs (similar to Notes' note IDs) but unfortunately there is no menu command to access the ID and copy it to the clipboard (or even see it). You can however drag the email message to the very small URL field of an event...

Image:Linking an email and event in Apple OSX

and this will insert the message ID as a link. When it is first inserted, it displays as message:, but after you close and reopen the event it shows as a more user friendly "Show in mail..." hotspot. I'd rather it insert the subject line from the email as the hotspot, but perhaps Apple will add that in a future version.

Image:Linking an email and event in Apple OSX

You can also drag an email from mail.app to the month view of iCal.app and it will create an event with the message link. I find this pretty useless, as you can't drop on a specific time. It is also very odd that it only works in the month view. Of the 3 choices (Day, Week, Month) that would have been my last choice for where to implement drag and drop creation.

While I'm talking about iCal.app, there are two things I'd like to see improved with the Event form:
1) Support for rich text in the note field
2) Allow resizing of the event window, as today it is currently way too skinny, especially with detailed calendar entries that contain conference call of webinar information. Someone please tell me I am missing something, and there is a way to resize them that I have not figured out yet. (you can't drag and resize from any of the corners)

This is link a document to calender entry using windows

I've always felt that one of the most power things about Lotus Notes was document links. Rather than duplicating data in multiple places, you can keep the data in one place, and then link to it from multiple other places. (email, calendars, Teamrooms, Document Library, custom applications, etc)

There is a Notes feature called "Copy Into" that copies the body of an email message into a calendar entry, but at times there is no need to duplicate the data. For example, if you receive an email that you want to follow up on, instead of duplicating the data, you can simply link the two documents together.

First, go to the email (or document in any database!) that you want to link to, and either from the right-click menu, or the Edit - Copy As menu at the top of the screen, choose Document Link.

Image:Link a document to a calendar entry

Second, go to the body field of the calendar entry, and choose paste. This will insert the document link, which you can click on when you want to access the original information.

Image:Link a document to a calendar entry

Of course this works in all sorts of scenarios, not just linking an email to a calendar entry. You can link any document to any document, and you really really should take advantage of it!

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