Need to programatically read contacts over the Web

[ntm]

I am designing a .NET program that needs to read contacts from a
corporate Outlook running on a different Windows machine. I'm an
Outlook user but I've never dealt with it programmatically.

I'm hoping to use Web Services to communicate, but I'm not sure if
there is any built-in Web Services support in Outlook for this. If
not, is there even an API, so that I could use it to write a Web
services provider that makes requests of Outlook?

Any ideas or pointers are much appreciated.