Can you sync a Pages library with Outlook?

An interesting question from one of my colleagues:

Can you sync the Pages list with an Outlook 2007 folder and still be able to read the HTML without the MOSS CSS and XSLT stuff?

Well, my gut feel was no, but I thought I’d take a look.

I found that the Connect to Outlook option was available on the Pages library settings, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Outlook showing the Pages library, but can't preview the page.

As we can see, we do have the Pages library synched, and you can see the pages within, but Outlook doesn’t know how to display them. I’m not surprised to be honest; I suspect that the default.aspx item actually just contains the data for the page – but isn’t yet rendered by the page layout or page. Still, one way to find out – open it and take a look:

An XML file that is shown when you open the Page item from Outlook

Yup, there you go – the XML of the page ListItem, and not a nice, rendered page with all the layout, master page, styles and stuff. Not really surprising, to be honest, but it would be nice if it did. I can’t think of how it might do that though – clearly the whole browser page would need to be rendered. An alternative would be to generate your pages via the Document Conversion Service, and to synch with the source documents themselves, rather than the pages.

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Can you sync a Pages library with Outlook?

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