Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 6, No. 25, 10 Apr 2002, of Exchange Messaging
Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and
Microsoft Outlook.
XML Web Services kit for Exchange
Microsoft kicked off its annual Tech*Ed conference today with a
push for Exchange-based XML Web services working with .NET
applications. In his keynote, Eric Rudder, senior vice president of
Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Group, announcing
immediate availability of a 3-CD toolkit to make it easy to connect
to Exchange 2000 data from .NET applications. The kit includes:
- the latest Exchange 2000 SDK (which you can also download -- see
Other New Resources below)
- white papers and other documentation
- sample XML Web services for scheduling, contacts, and workflow
- a self-paced training course on .NET development, with a special
module on Exchange XML Web services
- developer session videos from last year's MEC conference
You can order the Exchange 2000 XML Web Services Toolkit from
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/development/2000/enablekit.asp
-- $7.95 for U.S. customers, $9.90 for everyone else, plus a little
extra if you want express delivery. The kit will not be distributed
as part of MSDN subscriptions, except for the Exchange SDK.
Adding a pop-up message for Exchange DLs
I was asked a few months ago whether it's possible to prompt
users whenever they send a message to an Exchange distribution list.
I've posted an Outlook VBA code snippet at
http://www.slipstick.com/dev/code/promptdl.htm that demonstrates
how to do this with the Redemption library (http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/)
to avoid Outlook automation security prompts.
Would it be possible to do the same thing, but for an Outlook
distribution list, not an Exchange DL? No, because Outlook
automatically expands the DL when you send the item. By the time it
gets to the ItemSend event, there's no trace in the message that it
was ever addressed to an Outlook DL. Instead, however, you could
check the number of recipients and cancel the send if the item is
addressed to too many people.
Shared address book with Active
Directory
Another question that's come up lately is how to use the Active
Directory (AD) in Windows 2000 Server as a shared address book for
Outlook, even if you don't have Exchange Server. While implementing
AD in a large organization is something you wouldn't want to
undertake without weeks of planning, in a single small office with
only Windows 2000 Server, it's not that big a chore. Microsoft has
published a wealth of documentation at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/technologies/directory/ad/default.asp.
You can't create or modify items in AD with Outlook, but you
could create a web page to manage the directory on the company
intranet using the ADSI programming interface. The article "Learning
ADSI - Part 1: Adding Users To W2K" at
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/011005.htm is a good
introduction; it assumes you already know how to build .asp pages on
your web server.
Another reason to implement AD is that it allows you to apply
group policies to Outlook and other Office applications, for
example, to turn particular features off.
Once you have AD up and running and populated with the contacts
you want to share, the Microsoft Knowledgebase has a good article,
"How to Configure the Address Book to Query Users Contained in
Active Directory" at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=238007
on how to connect a client. The article is written mainly for
Outlook Express, but Outlook 2000 and 2002 also support LDAP. As the
instructions for "down-level" clients indicate, you may have to
enter domainname\username for the account name. Instead of port 389
normally used by LDAP, use port 3268 for the server's Global
Catalog.
Note that if the number of users entered in AD is large, users
won't be able to browse the entire list. Instead, they'll have to
search using the Find button in Outlook's address book.
Mark your calendar for MEC
The October dates for MEC (the conference formerly known as the
Microsoft Exchange Conference) look pretty firm. The Anaheim/Orange
County Convention Center in California lists it for October 9-12,
which is close to the October 7-11 dates that we've heard rumors
about. The convention center says they expect 5,000 attendees.