Need to programmaticaly access Outlook 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.

 

[Guest]

1. If you are looking at reading contacts within the
windows network, you dont need a webservice to do it. you
can use Extended MAPI to remote login to the server
machine to read contacts, provided there exists an
outlook account with enough privileges on the server
which u can use.

2. A more scalable solution is to have a web service
running on the server, which will run the same code, but
on teh server machine this time, and return contacts to
you. Care must be taken to validate users before allowing
them to read contacts information.

Regards
K

 

[ntm]

1. If you are looking at reading contacts within the
windows network, you dont need a webservice to do it. you
can use Extended MAPI to remote login to the server
machine to read contacts, provided there exists an
outlook account with enough privileges on the server
which u can use.

2. A more scalable solution is to have a web service
running on the server, which will run the same code, but
on teh server machine this time, and return contacts to
you. Care must be taken to validate users before allowing
them to read contacts information.

Regards
K

Thank you!

Can you tell me if Extended MAPI requires an Exchange Server? Is that
the server that is logged on to?

Or can you go directly to Outlook? Obviously I'm new to this.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP]]

Does "corporate Outlook" mean that you're using Exchange as the server? If so, Outlook should play no part at all in your application. Exchange 2000/2003 has support for web services built-in or you can access Exchange data directly with WebDAV -- details should be in the SDK at http://msdn.microsoft.com/exchange/ .
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Outlook and Exchange solutions at http://www.slipstick.com
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers