By popular demand, we're happy to announce the immediate availability of our Microsoft Outlook plug-in, which allows CATS users to quickly log communications with candidates and contacts directly from this popular email client.

We would like to give our thanks to the 80 or so CATS users that graciously accepted our invitation to test the plug-in during its BETA stage. Your feedback was invaluable and is directly responsible for us getting to this point. With such success, we'll certainly be implementing similar programs in the future.

While there is certainly no shortage of ideas for this tool, our primary focus in our first release is to automate the recording of conversation exchanges through email. This previously mundane task of copying and pasting messages has now been reduced to just a few clicks.

After installing our plug-in, a new toolbar will appear in Outlook titled "CATS" with our familiar product logo. Clicking on this button will bring up a list of features, which include logging of the selected message and an option to create a new candidate or contact to the system if they don't already exist. Options exist to import resumes and to edit the information being recorded. Time and dates of the original activities are preserved.

Development of this tool is far from complete. While we're confident in the stability of this particular feature-set, many plans such as calendar integration have been planned for the future; however, not to worry, the plug-in will keep itself up-to-date automatically by prompting you to update whenever a new version is available.

The plug-in is available to all of our professional subscribers at no additional charge and is compatible with Outlook 2000 or later on Windows. If you're not a professional subscriber and you're no longer on our professional trial, we'd be happy to issue a new trial period for you to try out the tool before upgrading – just contact our support team.

We invite you to visit our support forums at www.catsone.com/forum. We'll be monitoring these forums regularly to help answer any questions that you may have. Even if you have nothing to post, it may be beneficial to hear what other people are talking about in regards to their feedback and ideas for the new tool.

For download instructions, check out the CATS Outlook Plugin home page.

I'll be trying to post some FAQs regarding the Outlook Plugin here.

Question:

Why is my Archive to CATS button grayed out?

Answer:

You must have an email selected from within your inbox to archive a note to CATS. If an email is not selected, you will not be able to push this button.

Lisa,

I made a small change that should allow you to install.

Download the plug-in and try to install it again.

Question:

Why am I receiving the error "Unable to connect to the CATS server.
Please check your internet connection and try again."

Answer:

This error message is only triggered when CATS cannot access www.catsone.com. As long as you are able to do that, CATS should be able to detect an active Internet connection.

If problems persist, please contact .

Question:

Why am I getting the error message "Failed" when trying to authenticate my CATS login?

Answer:

Your login credentials are incorrect. Please double-check your company ID, username, and password.

We are receiving some reports about users not being able to install the toolbar, something to the tune of "You must be logged on as an administrator".

We have not been able to replicate this issue. We think some users may not have privileges to install this plug-in because of the way their network administrators have set up their access levels. If you can confirm that you are indeed an administrator on your local machine, please email a screenshot to and we will continue to look into this matter.

To find out your access level, navigate to your Start Menu -> Control Panel -> User Accounts. This might vary on Windows Vista/7, but it should be pretty close to the same.

Mike Lippman, upgrade to the latest version 1.62 and it should work.

Thanks for reporting this bug.

Thenon surfer,

Tony Kim,

Update to the latest 1.62 version.

Close Outlook, go to your plug-in install directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\CATS Outlook Plug-in\) and create a text file "debug.txt" (or just "debug" if Windows automatically adds the .txt part for you). Then run Outlook, and try to reproduce the issues you're experiencing. Then take the debug.txt file and send it to me (dev@catsone.com)

This file will have information for me to better diagnose the problem.

After that you can delete the debug.txt file so that it doesn't get written to any more.

Tony,

I believe that if you can successfully create the file as your user then you will be able to write to it. Try running outlook and see if that file has text in it after clicking the Archive button.

A general note to everyone,

We greatly appreciate you giving us your feedback in this thread, and reporting issues that you are having. We want to get this toolbar working the same for everyone. Obviously every system is different, so it's hard for us to test all scenarios. We need some crucial information from each report to help us try and identify possible similarities between reports and also save us time by having to ask for the following information each time...

When reporting a bug, please include the following data in your post:

• Windows version
• Outlook version
• Exact steps to reproduce problem
• If you think a screen shot would help us, feel free to email that directly to .
  

Tony Kim,

If you have an anti-virus running, try disabling it before you start Outlook and then try to send an email again. That might solve it. I am working on fixing this issue.

Tony Kim,

What edition of Windows 7 are you using? Also, what edition of Office do you have installed.

(i.e. Windows 7 Home premium, Office 2007 Ultimate, etc..)

Thanks

Everyone, I just published version 1.63 which will get rid of the "Method 'TextBody' not supported by automation object" error.

If you are getting a "Method 'HTMLBody' not supported by automation object" error, I am working with the tech support of a 3rd party library to figure out why this is happening.

PJ Cunningham,

You said that the plug-in does not work with an OPEN email and nothing happens? Are you talking about the auto-archive feature? When you have an email open, and the "Archive to CATS" button is toggled (press it so that it will stay pressed) then it will archive the mail to the recipients profiles if it finds it. What exactly are you doing in an open email window and what are the results that you are expecting? Thanks!

Thenon surfer,

I believe we fixed this issue for another person who was getting the same problem as you. Please try again and let me know if you still get an error.

I just published version 1.64.

It should fix the 'HTMLBody not supported' error. Please upgrade and let me know if you still get the error.

David Bann,

When out plug-in archives email it uses the email 'Sent On' date as the 'Created' date when adding it to the activity list. If the email is older than 72 hours, it will ask you if you want to use your computers date and time as the 'Created' date instead in a Yes/No dialog box. If you would like me to investigate this issue more please post instructions on how to replicate the issue that you're having. Thanks!