Has anyone implemented an e-mail suppression process to prevent iMIS users from sending e-mail to customers who have opted out of receiving e-mail per the CAN-SPAM act? We maintain a table of the e-mail addresses of our customers who have chosen not to receive any promotional e-mail. We use that table to exclude that set of customers when selecting lists for mass e-mail marketing campaigns. We also want to programatically prevent our iMIS users from sending e-mail through iMIS to these customers.

I went to one of Microsoft’s seminars yesterday to learn about their new user-interface directions, and I also learned about VSTO, which could be very useful in iMIS. Starting with .NET 2005, it is much easier to program office documents. One example is the new ServerDocument class, which allows efficient creation (and I think reading as well) of office documents on a server. It is much more efficient because it does not use the office programs themselves, which are designed for a single user. For example, you can create a Word or Excel document on a server without using Word or Excel. Also, it is much easier to integrate programming into office documents, which can now be done in C# using the standard .NET Framework.