Create a task from Entourage in RTM

You may remember that I said I was going to try out Remember the Milk last week. If not, catch up now.

All caught up? Good. I played with RTM a bit more and decided I’m going to give it a try. It seems to work really well and lots of people have written integrations for it.

Add to this story that I’ve decided to use Entourage instead of Parallels & Outlook at work. Unfortunately, Entourage’s task management is abysmal.

Starting to see where I’m going with this?

While I found lots of integrations available for RTM and other applications, I couldn’t find anything for Entourage. AppleScript to the rescue!

Without getting into all the gory details, the script (see link below) will allow you to highlight a message in Entourage and create a task in RTM based on the message. The message’s subject will be the task name and the message’s body will end up as a note.

Instructions:
1. Unzip and save in “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items”
2. Rename “Create Task from Message\cT.scpt” to “Create Task from Message.scpt”
3. Start Entourage (you do not need to restart if its already running).
4. Highlight a message and hit ^T.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions.
6. Get organized!

[Updated 2/24/2008] Added more steps for clarity.

(More information after the jump)

Create RTM Task\cT.scpt.zip

[poll=3]

Some requirements, also included in the script:

Script requirements (basically, my configuration… your milage may vary):
- Mac OS X 10.5.2
- Microsoft Mac Office 2008 w/Entourage
- XMLLIB osax by Satimage (Smile companion), available here: http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/downloads/downloads_companion_osaxen.html
- XML Tools 2.9 by Nate Night Software, available here: http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/XMLTools2/

FAQ:
- Q1: What if I want to change the email address associated with my RTM account?
- A1: Open a terminal window and run this “defaults delete com.apple.Entourage-RTM”. You will quickly go through the authentication process again and be asked the email address you would like to send to.

(send me questions and I’ll expand the FAQ)

There are also some user-configurable settings:

User configurable variables

Use email or use the API to create RTM tasks?
Pros of API: not dependent on email transmission, instant notification of failures.
Cons of API: Not very robust, cannot handle large notes.
Pros of email: Assuming you’re using this for entourage, you already have email open. Very robust, can send in any variable for the task (see http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answers/sending/emailinbox.rtm). Even if the connection is temporarily lost, the email will queue and will eventually show up as a task.
Cons of email: You have these emails in your Sent Items. Clogging up the internet with email.

default setting: true
available settings: true, false

IMPORTANT!! If you plan to use the API, make sure this file exists at ~/Library/Application Support/Entourage-RTM.
The file should be named “encodeurl.sh”. You can copy this text and paste it into a new file.

#!/usr/bin/tclsh
package require http
puts [::http::formatQuery [lindex $argv 0] [lindex $argv 1]]

property useEmailToCreateTasks : true

Parsing is only relevant to the API calls. If set to 1, RTM will attempt to find a due date in the task subject. Probably not really useful, but I don’t see a big downside to it, either.
default setting: “1″
available settings: “1″, “0″

property chooseParse : “1″

ADVANCED USAGE ONLY. Will display a whole lot of popups during the task creation.

default setting: false
available settings: true, false

property debugOn : false

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: Applescript, automate, Entourage, Remember the Milk, RTM, Task