Access to Outlook from ASP.NET

[grimbeast]

Hi

We are currently in the process of writing an asp.net application.

As part of the project we need to establish, some sort of communication
between the application and the users Outlook applications.

We have to use Outlook, and not Exchange, as the users are from many
different organisations.

We want to somehow, be able to communicate with the calender, ie.
creating new appointments etc.

How could this be done???

We are talking about writing some sort of application that could be
installed on the client machine, and then perhaps communicate with this
component????

Any suggestions for a plausible solution is more than welcome.

 

[Laurent Bugnion]

Hi,

Hi

We are currently in the process of writing an asp.net application.

As part of the project we need to establish, some sort of communication
between the application and the users Outlook applications.

We have to use Outlook, and not Exchange, as the users are from many
different organisations.

We want to somehow, be able to communicate with the calender, ie.
creating new appointments etc.

How could this be done???

We are talking about writing some sort of application that could be
installed on the client machine, and then perhaps communicate with this
component????

Any suggestions for a plausible solution is more than welcome.

With Outlook running on the client, and your web application too, you'll
need to relax security. If you can do that, then Outlook can easily be
scripted, and it's fairly easy to write JavaScript code to access
Outlook's objects.

Check Outlook's documentation for examples (they are usually in
VBScript, but it's easy to translate in JavaScript).

Note however, again, that you won't be allowed to instantiate the
Outlook ActiveX component and access its objects under normal security
conditions.

HTH,
Laurent

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

I think you may be thinking of it in too difficult a fashion. You don't want
to necessarily communicate directly with outlook, that's difficult as most
browsers try to protect your computer from having a web site talk directly
to it. Browsers do understand MIME types, and they do know where to put
objects. You should be able to craft an item, such as an outlook calendar
appointment, from ASP.Net if you know the correct formatting. An example I
found is at: http://zones.advisor.com/doc/17330 Other items have similar
formats that you can follow to essentially dump the appropriate text to the
browser and let it figure out where and what to attach it to. This avoids
writing a custom application which would be a relative nightmare since you'd
still have to find some way for that application to communicate both with
Outlook and your system, and ASP.Net wouldn't necessarily do that.

Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage

 

[grimbeast]

Hi Mark

Thanks for your input - we already have the described functionality,
but we would like to have something that are more automated and
integrated.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance

 

[grimbeast]

Hi Laurent

Thank you for your input.

A scripting solution would not be the prefeered way to solve the
problem.

We would very much like to have some sort of component on the client
that we can communicate with from asp.net.

Any other suggestions???

BRGDS