Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Contact folder distribution lists presents some what of a challenge when it comes to scripting and programmatic access. The members in these lists are held in a couple of binary MAPI properties and there are no direct interfaces to modify these lists using CDOEX. Modifing the properties directly using Exoledb or WebDAV is possible in some cases just not very easy or flexible. Fortunately OWA does provide a method to create and modify these contact distribution lists which can easily be used in a automation script. Creating a DL, This is the one thing that you can do easily using CDOEX,ADO or WEBDAV but one extra thing you can do with OWA is create a DL and add a member to it at the same time. The one restriction I found for this is you can only add one member at a time per request. The following script creates a new DL in a public folder using the save cmd. You need to put the name of your new DL in http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/dlname=NewDlName Set ObjxmlHttp = CreateObject(...

I had this request from one of my customers recently who wanted me to copy all the contacts from one mailbox into another. The easiest way to do this would have been to use outlook to export the contacts folder to a pst and then just import them back into the other mailbox using Outlook. Because i manage this client remotely and there's no Outlook on the Exchange server itself (and i really didn't feel like talking the users though this) I came up with the following Exoledb/CDOEX script to do the copy. The challenge when copying anything between mailbox's or public folders is you cant do a direct copy (eg ADO copyrecord only works within a mailbox or public store) so you have to use another solution. What this script does is first does a query to get all the URL's of contacts in the mailbox's contact folder. Then it opens up each contact using the CDO.Person interface and then access's the vcard stream on each contact object . The script then copies this vcard s...

A while ago I posted this about creating a simple html calendar like the ones you see in OWA. I was looking though some OWA captures today and noticed the following command is called when you manipulate the calender object in OWA. ?Cmd=monthfreebusy&start=2004-07-25T00:00:00+10:00&end=2004-09-05T00:00:00+10:00 (the +10:00 at the end I believe refers to the time zone offset which you need to adjust to your own timezone or put some code in that does it) What this does is return a single string of numbers with each day in-between the &start and &end variables represented by a 0 if there are no appointments that day, a 1 if there is and a 2 is no freebusy data has been published. I took this function and combined it with some WebDAV in a ASP page and was able to feed the simple html calendar and make it bold all the dates in the calendar that there where appointments on, I also created a few functions so you could change months back and forth. The limitations of this metho...

From the feedback I've received about the first public folder RSS feed sink I've come up with another version that incorporates many bug fixes and add's in some additional functionality. The main functionality change and bug fix revolves around the publishing of the content of each public folder message. In the original sink I was using the Textdescription field which represented the text body of the email. The problem with this is that firstly the carriage returns weren't interpreted right in the XML file so if you had a long message it just appeared all stuck together with no formatting. To fix this there where two options the first was to continue using the textdescription field and then just replace any ASCII 13 characters (Line breaks in a email) with html line break characters eg replace(Rs.fields("urn:schemas:httpmail:textdescription"),chr(13),"<br/>") The second option and the one I've gone for is to use the urn:schemas:httpmail:htm...

This was something interesting I learned this week. If you want to process meeting requests remotely the same way you can locally with CDOEX then using a combination of WebDAV and some OWA commands can make this happen. Process the request Basically when someone invites you to a meeting you will get sent a calendar message that contains all the invitation information. You can differentiate this from a normal message by looking at the DAV:Contentclass and seeing if its set to urn:content-classes:calendarmessage. Now if you want to scan a inbox for any of these messages you could do a WebDAV search against that mailbox for any messages that have this particular content class and also who’s outlookmessage class was set to IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request which delineates this as a meeting request. Eg server = "servername" mailbox = "mailbox" strURL = "http://" & server & "/exchange/" & mailbox & "/inbox/" strQuery = " ...