Outlook 2007 shows pictures of contacts on the right hand side of the mail form. This only works for your personal contacts and if you have photos.
Is there a way to hook that picture up to the GAL or AD for the company so that all employees photos show automatically? Hopefully without having to write and deploy a new msg form.
To store a photo in AD, you can use the jpegPhoto attribute (see formal description in MSDN). Here is a way to do it using VBScript, and here's one to do it using VB.NET.
I'm not sure Outlook 2007 makes use of this value (my guess is - it does not), but it's worth a try. My guess is even that Outlook does not care about the jpegPhoto if you put someone from the GAL to your personal address book. Anyway, this should be easy enough to test.
If all else fails, you are stuck with either making clear that it doesn't work or building a custom form that reads the value.
Outlook will only display the photo from a personal contact, not the GAL or AD. Making a new form is not as option.
I have managed to use the PersonName smart tag to add a menu option to the context menu which looks up and displays the photo in a browser. Not optimal. Anyone got other ideas?