Talking with Exchange Server

The usual requirements of talking with outlook can be handled by the rather extensive object model which outlook provides. Now, if you want to interact with outlook from a server based application (say ASP.NET or a remoting host), using object model might not be the right solution since you need outlook client installed, you might have to configure individual profiles etc. A better approach could be talk directly to the exchange server.

To talk with Exchange, the following approaches seems available (be-ware; even after you select you preferredAPI and talking channel, you could easily get lost in the n versions of the library one for each of the outlook versions.) :

1.) CDO-EX objects:
Of the various versions of CDO, the version for exchange - CDOEX could be used to manage components in the exchange server. The only issue here being that the application consuming CDOEX needs to be on the same machine as that of the server. CDO 1.2.1 does seem to let you access exchange servers remotely but could not get it to install on a machine without outlook 2007 :(

Note that as of Outlook 2007, it appears CDO is being provided as a separate download.

2.) WebDAV
The slowest of the lot and the most difficult to understand, uses plain http requests in an xml format to perform each action. The convenience (you can use it remotely too) of using this method usually outweighs the speed and the learning curve.

WebDAV notifications using HTTPU is interesting in that you get notifications from the remote server via UDP message. A simple explanation with example is available at infinitec.de

3.) Exchange OLE DB
An OLE Db provider for exchange sounds like the best possible way to talk with exchange server. Sadly, your happiness ends when msdn tells you that the application consuming this driver needs to be on the same server as that of the exchange. Err!

Effectively, if performance is your main concern, your preference should be to go for CDO/OleDB/WebDav (in that order). Perhaps the future release of the Exchange API/SDK might contain a Microsoft.Exchange.Server.Core assembly to talk directly and easily.

Shall talk about using WebDAV within a C# application in detail in one of the upcoming posts.