Hi,

My organisation have upgraded to Outlook 2013 but for various reasons (around data privacy, and a few technical issues) they will not upload everyone's contact photos to the GAL (300,000+ users). This makes Outlook very messy as there are just greyed out portraits everywhere which adds nothing to the experience and just takes up valuable space.

We do, however, have an internal social media platform that most people have signed up to (and accepted appropriate disclaimers), and most people also take the option to add their 'profile' pic to this platform. I want to link Outlook to this, all on the client side. On the surface, it shouldn't be too difficult, we store the employee ID in the GAL under the 'Alias' field, and the photos are stored on the social media platform using this number. So for example, if my employee ID (alias) is 12345678, then my photo is on the server at: server.myorg.com/photos/people/12345678.jpg

SO what I'm looking to do is write some VBA that will override the photo fetching code in Outlook and instead try and pull the photo from this webserver, instead of the Exchange server. It will obviously have to fail gracefully if it gets a 404, and give up in a reasonable time if it is operating somewhere where it cannot access the server.

I'm a pretty good casual coder, and I've written a lot of VBA scripts in Excel before, however I have no idea where to start on this one. All my previous projects have been to add buttons to toolbars, or stuff the is initiated from user actions. I have no idea how to trigger something from an internal Outlook event, or how to override built in functionality.

Is this even possible? IF so - could someone point me in the right direction?

THank you!