Skip to main content

Using Contact photo's in EWS in Exchange 2010

Contact photo's where a feature first introduced in Outlook 2003 but up until the release on Exchange 2010 not something you could use in EWS. This should not be confused with another new feature in Exchange 2010 which is the ability to upload a picture to the Gal (or the directory to be more precise) if your interested in finding out more about that check out Ilse post .

So the Contact photo's I'm talking about are those that are associated with contact Items in your mailbox. About 4 years ago i posted this script (which was rubbish) for doing this with CDO 1.2 importantly in the heady stile of 2005 i pointed out that when using contact photos you need to set some extended properties on the attachment. Now while you still can't do this with EWS :( in 2010 they have added the ability to set the properties of a contact photo(just wish they hadn't stopped there). Further the EWS Managed API actually makes the process of adding a contact photo quite easy.

So a very simple piece of code to add a contact photo in C# would look like


ExchangeService service = new ExchangeService(ExchangeVersion.Exchange2010);
service.AutodiscoverUrl("emailaddres@domain.com");
Folder Contacts = Folder.Bind(service, WellKnownFolderName.Contacts);
Contact cn1 = new Contact(service);
cn1.GivenName = "Fred";
cn1.Surname = "Bloggs";
cn1.EmailAddresses[EmailAddressKey.EmailAddress1] = "fblogs@domain.com";
cn1.Subject = "Fred Bloggs";
FileAttachment atattach = cn1.Attachments.AddFileAttachment("c:\\contactphoto.jpg");
atattach.IsContactPhoto = true;
cn1.Save();

For those looking for a Powershell version that you can put to work I've got one of those as well the following is a script that allows you to specify the emailaddress of the contact you want update and the photo you want to use. The script will then search for this conact in the mailboxes contact folder and upload the picture to it (if found). I've put a download of this script here the code itself looks like.

$MailboxName = "user@mbmailbox.com"
$emEmailAdddrestoFind = "fred@fred.com"
$cntPhotoFile = "c:\ck1.jpg"

$dllpath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.0\Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll"
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($dllpath)
$service = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeService([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeVersion]::Exchange2010)

$windowsIdentity = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
$sidbind = "LDAP://<SID=" + $windowsIdentity.user.Value.ToString() + ">"
$aceuser = [ADSI]$sidbind

$service.AutodiscoverUrl($mailboxname)

$folderid = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderId([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::Contacts,$MailboxName)
$ContactsFolder = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.Folder]::Bind($service,$folderid)
$Iview = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ItemView(1000)
$SfSearchFilter = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+IsEqualTo([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ContactSchema]::EmailAddress1,$emEmailAdddrestoFind)
$frContactResults = $ContactsFolder.FindItems($SfSearchFilter,$Iview)
foreach ($cnContacts in $frContactResults.Items){
$cnContacts.Subject
$atattach = $cnContacts.Attachments.AddFileAttachment($cntPhotoFile)
$atattach.IsContactPhoto = $true
$cnContacts.update([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ConflictResolutionMode]::AlwaysOverwrite)
}

Labels

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Gr...
Read more

Exporting and Uploading Mailbox Items using Exchange Web Services using the new ExportItems and UploadItems operations in Exchange 2010 SP1

Two new EWS Operations ExportItems and UploadItems where introduced in Exchange 2010 SP1 that allowed you to do a number of useful things that where previously not possible using Exchange Web Services. Any object that Exchange stores is basically a collection of properties for example a message object is a collection of Message properties, Recipient properties and Attachment properties with a few meta properties that describe the underlying storage thrown in. Normally when using EWS you can access these properties in a number of a ways eg one example is using the strongly type objects such as emailmessage that presents the underlying properties in an intuitive way that's easy to use. Another way is using Extended Properties to access the underlying properties directly. However previously in EWS there was no method to access every property of a message hence there is no way to export or import an item and maintain full fidelity of every property on that item (you could export the...
Read more

Sending a Message in Exchange Online via REST from an Arduino MKR1000

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You ...
Read more
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.