Custom project form available

[Bollinger]

Hi all!

I've made my work on a custom project form for GTD available for download
as an attachement to this message. (See post http://www.davidco.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3812 for details).

Disclaimer:
This is not a product of any kind, just an unsupported contribution to the forum of the custom form I'm using with GTD. Be careful when playing around with forms in Outlook so you don't loose any data.
This form is used with Outlook 2003 and the compatibility with other Outlook versions is unknown. I advise you to backup your existing data before use. Use it at your own risk.

Installation:
1. Unzip GTD-Template.fdm from attachment
2. Go to "Tools/Options/Other/Advanced options/Custom Forms"
3. Make sure "Personal Forms" is choosen in the upper right textbox
4. Choose "Install" and point to the extracted GTD-Template.fdm file
5. Change the default "Task folder" property "When posting to this folder, use:" to the newly installed form. ("Forms../Personal Forms Library")
6. Mark "Use custom form in Task folder" under "Other settings" in GTD-properties ("Tools/Options/Getting things done")
7. Now hopefully when creating new projects from the GTD-addin should result in using the new form.
8. If you want to choose "Master project" in the new form, register a new GTD-project for each master project with prefix "$MP:". ex "$MP:Home" adds
a entry to the list named "Home". Master projects can be filtered out from
project views in outlook just by adding a filter "Subject + doesn't contain + $MP:"

Converting existing projects (again, be careful...):
Exisiting GTD-projects must be converted to use the new form insted of the stadard Task-form. This can be done with programs changing the messageclass of Outlook items, for example DocMessageClass.

Be careful not changing the whole Task-folder to the new message class. This would force all existing NA-items to use the form and that is not the intention. Just the GTD project tasks should be converted

Instead move all GTD-projects to a newly created task folder and change the messageclass of that folder from "IPM.Task" to "IPM.Task.GTD-Template". Then move the projects back to the original folder.

There might be a problem converting "start dates"/"due dates"/"reminder dates" to the new form so write it down before converting existing projects and register them again after conversion.

Outlook views can be customized to include sorting/filtering on the custom fields in the new form. In "Field Chooser" select "User-defined fields in folder" and include any of the items starting with "GTD" in the view.

Voila, now everything should work as expected (hopefully).

If anybody has problems, I'll try to be as helpful as I can.

Regards
Mattias