Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Contacts can be a constant source or pain and target for automation within any Exchange environment because of our ever growing propensity to move, create ,import and export mailboxes as well as the ever growing list of mobile, tablet devices, social network sites and software that creates and distributes contacts in a wide variety of formats. If you have ever scripted contacts in Exchange because of the amount of properties and different formats of these properties you may have realized that writing a flexible reusable script can be challenge. These scripts tend to become long and messy which make them harder to reuse in varying situations. So my goal was to write something that first I could use easily to import contacts from a CSV file but also down the track tackle some Vcard import code I need to port across. With Exchange contacts you have 5 distinct property groups you need to deal with in EWS Normal (things like FirstName, LastName etc) Phone (Mobile, Home Business etc) Addres...

In such an imperfect world in which we live coming up with different ways to look at seemingly ignorable problems can sometime be at the heart of innovation. It always strikes me a little odd that while the systems around the our inbox’s have grown and changed over’s the years there has always been a deficit in change around the way information is presented to us in that Inbox folder structure and the way in which a person can flexibly control the operation of how information is presented. In 2010 the new conversation view is a good step forward and some nice eye candy with its ability to group messages within a conversation. However for me this feels a little short of how one would intuitively look at a conversation. Eg a true conversation view would be able to explode the email conversation into conservatory elements rather than just grouping the emails together and asking me to do all the handwork. The problem with the later is it becomes another poweruser function useful to all bu...