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Flexible Exchange Contact creation script using Powershell import-csv and the EWS Managed API

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)
Address (Home, Business, Other)
Email (3 different)
Extended Properties – (Any Mapi properties that aren’t provided by strongly-typed contact in EWS)

Each of these properties need to be set in their own unique way so to make using contacts easier I wanted a script that would essentially flatten out the process. Eg one method that can be used to set any property no matter how few or how many of the actual contact properties that I wanted to set. What I came up with to cater for this was first a instead of setting properties directly on the strongly-typed object I’ve used a Hashtable to store a custom object to act as an intermediary. This then allowed me to create a simple function to allow for setting each property

function SetProp([String]$Type,[Object]$Name,[Object]$Value){
$p1Prop1 = "" | select proptype,name,value
$p1Prop1.proptype = $Type
$p1Prop1.name = $Name
$p1Prop1.value = $Value
$ContactProps.Add($Name,$p1Prop1)
}

So the property Type would be one of the five types I’ve listed above the name would be the name of the property (or for the more complex name the name of the dictionary property and the actually property separated with a (.).)
This means when I want to set a normal property like first name I can use

SetProp "Normal" "GivenName" “Contacts First Name”

If I want to set the first Email address I would use

SetProp "Email" "EmailAddress1.Address" “User@emailaddress.com”

To set the Home address properties of a contact you need

SetProp "Address" "Home.City" "Blah Blah"
SetProp "Address" "Home.State" "NSW"
SetProp "Address" "Home.Street" "19 Blah Ave"
SetProp "Address" "Home.PostalCode" "2153"

For Extended properties it does require more the one line because the property does need to be defined for example to set the Pr_Gender property use

$gender = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExtendedPropertyDefinition(14925,[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.MapiPropertyType]::Short)
SetProp "Extended" $gender 2

Once all the properties are set you then call the CreateContact function which will then enumerate back through the Hashtable and has some logic that should then deal with the messiness of setting the actual strongly type object properties within a minimal amount of code.

Putting it to use

I built this script to do some hard work so the first task I had was create a bunch of different contacts within different public folders from different CSV files. The CSV file was pretty simple it had firstName , LastName, Company , EmailAddress . Powershell has a create CSV cmdlet called import-csv that make working with text file really easy so this solved that part easy. To create contact in a public folder I first need to find the EWSid of the folder in question. Fortunately I already had the code from another script. The finally script that did the Public Folder import from a CSV looked like the following. I've put a downlaod with a few different version of this here.

The script itself looks like.

### Contact Property List
###
### Normal : to Set eg SetProp "Normal" "GivenName" "MyfirstName"
### http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.exchange.webservices.data.contact_members%28v=EXCHG.80%29.aspx
###
### Email : to Set eg SetProp "Email" "EmailAddress1.Address" "glenscales@yahoo.com"
### EmailAddress1.Address
### EmailAddress2.Address
### EmailAddress3.Address
### EmailAddress1.Name
### EmailAddress2.Name
### EmailAddress3.Name
###
### Phone : to Set eg SetProp SetProp "Phone" "MobilePhone" "2345234523"
### AssistantPhone The assistant's phone number.
### BusinessFax The business fax number.
### BusinessPhone The business phone number.
### BusinessPhone2 The second business phone number.
### Callback The callback number.
### CarPhone The car phone number.
### CompanyMainPhone The company's main phone number.
### HomeFax The home fax number.
### HomePhone The home phone number.
### HomePhone2 The second home phone number.
### Isdn The ISDN number.
### MobilePhone The mobile phone number.
### OtherFax An alternate fax number.
### OtherTelephone An alternate phone number.
### Pager The pager number.
### PrimaryPhone The primary phone number.
### RadioPhone The radio phone number.
### Telex The Telex number.
### TtyTddPhone The TTY/TTD phone number.
###
### Address : to Set eg SetProp SetProp "Address" "Business.City" "Sydney"
###
### Business.City
### Business.CountryOrRegion
### Business.PostalCode
### Business.State
### Business.Street
###
### Home.City
### Home.CountryOrRegion
### Home.PostalCode
### Home.State
### Home.Street
###
### Other.City
### Other.CountryOrRegion
### Other.PostalCode
### Other.State
### Other.Street
###
### Extended : to Set
###
### $AddressGuid = new-object Guid("00062004-0000-0000-C000-000000000046")
###
### $email1DisplayNameProp = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExtendedPropertyDefinition($AddressGuid,32896, [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.MapiPropertyType]::String)
### SetProp "Extended" $email1DisplayNameProp "Fredoo"
###
### $gender = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExtendedPropertyDefinition(14925,[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.MapiPropertyType]::Short)
### SetProp "Extended" $gender 2
###

$MailboxName = "user@domain.com"
$csvFile = "c:\allcustm.csv"

$AddressGuid = new-object Guid("00062004-0000-0000-C000-000000000046")
$dllpath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.0\Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll"
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($dllpath)

function SetProp([String]$Type,[Object]$Name,[Object]$Value){
$p1Prop1 = "" | select proptype,name,value
$p1Prop1.proptype = $Type
$p1Prop1.name = $Name
$p1Prop1.value = $Value
$ContactProps.Add($Name,$p1Prop1)
}

Function FindTargetFolder([String]$FolderPath){
$tfTargetFolder = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.Folder]::Bind($service,[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::PublicFoldersRoot)
$pfArray = $FolderPath.Split("/")
for ($lint = 1; $lint -lt $pfArray.Length; $lint++) {
$pfArray[$lint]
$fvFolderView = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderView(1)
$SfSearchFilter = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+IsEqualTo([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderSchema]::DisplayName,$pfArray[$lint])
$findFolderResults = $service.FindFolders($tfTargetFolder.Id,$SfSearchFilter,$fvFolderView)
if ($findFolderResults.TotalCount -gt 0){
foreach($folder in $findFolderResults.Folders){
$tfTargetFolder = $folder
}
}
else{
"Error Folder Not Found"
$tfTargetFolder = $null
break
}
}
$Global:findFolder = $tfTargetFolder
}

function CreateContact($service,$ContactProps,$Folder){

$NewContact = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.Contact($service)

$ContactProps.GetEnumerator() | foreach-object {
$propName = $_.Value.name
$propValue = $_.Value.value
if ($_.Value.proptype -ne "Extended"){
$psplit = $propName.split(".")
$pval1 = $psplit[0]
$pval2 = $psplit[1]
}
Switch($_.Value.proptype){
"Normal" {$NewContact.$propName = $propValue}
"Email" {
if ($NewContact.EmailAddresses.Contains([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailAddressKey]::$pval1)){
$EmailEntry = $NewContact.EmailAddresses[[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailAddressKey]::$pval1]
}
else{
$EmailEntry = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailAddress
}
$EmailEntry.$pval2 = $propValue
$NewContact.EmailAddresses[[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailAddressKey]::$pval1] = $EmailEntry
}
"Phone" {
$NewContact.PhoneNumbers[[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PhoneNumberKey]::$propName] = $propValue
}
"Address"{
if ($NewContact.PhysicalAddresses.Contains([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PhysicalAddressKey]::$pval1)){
$PhysicalAddressEntry = $NewContact.PhysicalAddresses[[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PhysicalAddressKey]::$pval1]
}
else{
$PhysicalAddressEntry = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PhysicalAddressEntry
}
$PhysicalAddressEntry.$pval2 = $propValue
$NewContact.PhysicalAddresses[[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PhysicalAddressKey]::$pval1] = $PhysicalAddressEntry
}
"Extended" {
$NewContact.SetExtendedProperty($propName,$propValue)
}


}
}
$NewContact.Save($Global:findFolder.Id)
"Contact Created : " + $NewContact.FileAs
$Global:newContact = $NewContact
}


$service = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeService([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeVersion]::Exchange2007_SP1)

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

$service.AutodiscoverUrl($aceuser.mail.ToString())


$folderid = FindTargetFolder ("/folder1/folder2")

$ContactProps = @{ }


import-csv $csvFile | foreach-object {
$ContactProps.Clear()
SetProp "Normal" "GivenName" $_.FirstName
SetProp "Normal" "Surname" $_.LastName
$fileasName = $_.FirstName + "," + $_.LastName
SetProp "Normal" "Subject" $fileasName
SetProp "Normal" "FileAs" $fileasName
SetProp "Normal" "CompanyName" $_.Company
SetProp "Email" "EmailAddress1.Address" $_.Email
CreateContact $service $ContactProps

}
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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.