Run two copies of Outlook simultaneously

[Tony1044]

Not sure if anyone needs this (or even cares, lol) but I've come up with a way to run multiple copies of Outlook (not Outlook Express or Windows Mail, I'm afraid).

Bit of background and why you may want to:

Take myself. I have an email account for the company for which I'm currently contracting to, my own personal account and my own company account.

These are all Exchange accounts and that's the first problem - you can only have one Exchange account per profile and you can't usually run two copies of Outlook because the first thing it does is check to see if an outlook process is running and bings that one to the foreground.

It doesn't work with "Run as" either - this just brings the running copy to the front again.

In order to make it work, you need to download a little piece of code that hooks into the "is outlook already running?" check and basically forces an answer of "no it isn't".

You can download it from my website here: http://www.johncock.co.uk/ExtraOutlook.zip

I can't and won't take credit for the work that went into writing that. It was down to a programmer known as the "Hammer of God"

The program has been thoroughly checked for any kind of virus or malware and comes out as clean on all of them.

The next step is to create your relevant Outlook profiles (if you don't know how then this probably isn't for you anyway).

Next, create a shortcut that will launch Outlook, through ExtraOutlook, with the relevant profile. It will look something like:

C:\ExtraOutlook\ExtraOutlook.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe" /profile home

And then you may have something like:

C:\ExtraOutlook\ExtraOutlook.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe" /profile work

And in each of these examples, you would have created the profiles for work and home with the relevant settings.

Rename each shortcut to something that logically maps what they're for "Home Outlook" and "Work Outlook" for example and change the icon by searching for the one in Outlook.exe so it looks correct.

Voilá - enjoy running multiple copies of Outlook.

One word of advice - it can screw up search and indexing programs, but seems to work with Xobni (try it - wonderful free addon for Outlook that saves hours of searching and organising) Xobni - Outlook Plugin to Search People, Email, and Attachments Instantly (it's Inbox spelt backwards).

As ever, you do this at your own risk and don't blame me if you cock anything up, but also do feel free to PM or mail me if you want any help.

And I've been running it for months with no apparent ill affects.