Sending Tasks using an offline Outlook - outlook

I've a scenario wherein I need to send/assign tasks from my browser UI to the concerned. This should happen with Outlook being offline (or for that matter outlook not even configured on the terminal) so that the user can be accessing a workflow from any terminal (using his/her AD credentials) and if required should have the ability to send a task to the concerned without having to return to his own terminal to be able to do so.
I envision that the user's credentials should be used to look up the AD for his/her email ID and send a task using the same from anywhere in the intranet.
Using Outlook object library I have been able to assign/send tasks, but with the Outlook being fired up and not otherwise.
Redemption does the sync of contacts while Outlook is offline but not tasks.
Kindly help if anybody has had a chance to do something similar.
Thanks in advance.

Redemption could help you here as you can run it it on a web server which will connect to you exchange env via mapi for you.
There are other ways dependant on you version of exchange EWS or Exchange DAV.
EWS comes with a managed API now a days to take some of the sting out of it.
There are similar 3rd party libraries for Exchange DAV as well.
They all contain contact and directory lookups.

Related

Outlook deferredDeliveryTime goes to outbox and If application is closed it does not send

I am building an Outlook Add-in that is using the Outlook mailitem property deferredDeliveryTime in order to postpone the sending of the message. Everything works fine but I have realized that if I send an email using deferedDeliveryTime and the application is closed it won't send the email until the application is reopened which defeats the purpose of the add-in. I am using Exchange/Office 365 and should therefore be able to push the message to the messaging queue and then close the application but I don't know how to do this.
One solution I have found is disabling the "Use Cached Exchange Mode to download email to an Outlook data file" in Account Settings. When disabled it sends the message immediately to the Exchange server but I need this setting to be enabled due to group policy.
I believe it should be possible to have it enabled while still being able to immediately send to Exchange. Do anyone know how/if this works? Or if there is some workaround.
You are on the right avenue, Outlook add-ins work only when the host application is launched. When you deal with a cached mode of connecting to the Exchange server your data is kept locally until Outlook synchronizes its folders. The non-cached mode works a bit different - the data is reflected from the server-side and no cache is preserved locally, your changes are reflected on the server-side almost immediately. It seems you have found a possible workaround already.
But you may also consider using EWS when Outlook is closed at any point of time, see Explore the EWS Managed API, EWS, and web services in Exchange for more information. For Office365 accounts you may take a look at MS Graph.
I have not tried that particular scenario, but you should be able to create a message in the online mode and send it in that mode. On the Extended MAPI (C++ or Delphi only) level, you can open the parent folder (e.g., Outbox) with the MAPI_NO_CACHE flag, create the message (IMAPIFolder::CreateMessage), populate its properties, and send it (IMessage::SubmitMesage) - since the parent folder is opened in the online mode, the newly created message will also be in the online mode.
If Extended MAPI is not an option, you can try to use Redemption (I am its author, any language) - it will let you open a folder in the online mode (RDOSession.GetFolderFromID(..., MAPI_NO_CACHE | MAPI_BEST_ACCESS)).

Exception thrown when user attempts to create an appointment in a shared calendar

We have an In-house executable which creates Outlook Meetings and Appointments in shared calendars.
One user is having a problem creating appointments in a shared calendar using this code. This code's been running fine for years now.
WHAT HAS BEEN TRIED:
I had the user access the Calendar directly through Outlook. She was able to create meetings in the Shared Calendar without a problem.
EXCEPTION THROWN:
"The operation failed because of a registry or installation problem. Restart Outlook and try again. If the problem persists, reinstall."
Re-installing Outlook would be a major inconvenience for the user.
I'm wondering.
What area in the Registry would I look at?
Would recreating the .PST file be a reasonable alternative?
Can I use Outlook Redemption to troubleshoot the user's account?
It seems your Outlook profile (or Outlook installation itself) is corrupted. You can take a look at the Windows event log what else Outlook states about the error incident. At this stage, it is not clear whether it is related to the profile corruption (to re-create a pst) or Outlook itself.
Redemption is a wrapper around Extended MAPI (a low-level API on which Outlook is built on). But it doesn't provide any self-diagnostic services, only convenient access to the low-level functions. However, you can use Redemption for getting your job done without Outlook involved.
I'd suggest opening a support case with Microsoft if you need to continue working with OOM.
It turns out that it was a data issue.
I asked the user to create Appointments for other shared calendars using our custom executable. She was able to do so without a problem.
The exception message that I posted came from the call to GetSharedDefaultFolder
The Recipient parameter was created using an email address that doesn't exist on our Exchange server. That bad email address came from our database.

How to get user device type accessing skype for business bot built in MS Bot Framework

Does anyone know how to get the information about user device that access the bot deployed in S4B channel and built using MS Bot Framework (C#).
I need to know about the options to detect the user device (Device type and OS) accessing the Skype For Business Bot. If there's a way to know whether user device is desktop or mobile. In bot framework the User-Agent header formatted similar to the string below:
SFBUserAgent (Microsoft-BotFramework/3.1+https://botframework.com/ua)
(The user agent from Connector returns the following:
fxversion/4.7.2563.0 osname/windowsserver2016datacenter osversion/6.3.14393 microsoft.bot.connector.connectorclient/3.14.1.1)
I want to know if UCWA can be used to detect the device type accessing Skype For Business bot.
UCWA is not able to do so, actually no client or client-facing api can provide such information. It's because User-Agent information is not part of the presence so the client doesn't publish it to other clients. The main purpose of this User-Agent information is for monitoring reporting purpose.
However there is still some space from server side to allow us to do something. If you have access to the Skype for Business server, you have several workarounds.
Get-CsConnections.ps1 is a well-known script to pull current logged in user from Lync server side. It was written in 2011 while we only had Lync 2010, but good news is it works fine with new version of Lync like Lync Server 2013, Skype for Business server 2015. This script needs to be run in Lync/Skype management shell or a Powershell session with Lync/Skype modules imported. It needs to run by using an Lync/Skype admin account.
To retrieve user agent for a particular user by using sip uri.
$UserHomePool = (Get-CsUser -Identity [sip address]).RegistrarPool
Get-CsConnections.ps1 -SipAddress [sip address] -Pool $UserHomePool
Connections.ps1 is the prototype script of the above Get-CsConnections.ps1, it's simpler but doesn't provide advanced features. You can look at it and decide which one you need.
Do it yourself. If you don't want to use 3rd party script or just want to do it in a simplest and pure way, it's possible to do it by querying it from server database. Lync/Skype server stores this user agent information in the dynamic database in Front End server. It's in the table dbo.RegistrarEndpoint of the database rtcdyn of the instance rtclocal.
Please notice that there is no public document about the database schema so you need to do a little guess and hacking yourself. Good news is all data in the database is strored in readable format so it shouldn't be a big issue.
In a very rare chance that you are not wanting this information in real-time, the monitoring report and database can be the best approach. It's not real-time data, the data is generated within 10 mins after a conversation is ended.
If you want to get it from monitoring database, you should look at SessionDetails view for P2P conversation and ConferenceSessionDetails for conference conversation. There are straighforward fields in the views called something like UserClientType to point out the user agent information for the certain session.
At last one thing I would like to remind is Skype allows user to logged in multiple clients simultaneously, so no matter how you make it work you still need to face the question which logged in client really matters to you if the user has multiple clients logged in.

How can I programmatically access tasks in hotmail?

I would like to be able to programmatically access Hotmail tasks so I can keep resetting the reminder until the task is marked as complete. Does anyone know how to do this?
I have seen that there is a Hotmail API here: http://isdk.dev.live.com/?mkt=en-us
but I haven't seen where you can access the task information only the calendar.
I have also seen that Hotmail uses Active Sync so I am guessing it is possible to write an Active Sync client to be able to retrieve task information (please correct me if I am wrong about this), I found more information about that here: ActiveSync library and How do I implement activesync protocol in iphone app?. Some people have suggested using Exchange Web Services, but from what I read Hotmail doesn't support this.
Thanks
Grant

Using MAPI w/ C++, how can I open another user's Inbox?

I'm looking to write an automated monitor script to programmatically retrieve information from another user's Exchange 2003 inbox. I have working C++ code to log into MAPI and connect to my own inbox. I can also use the Control Panel->Mail applet to configure another user's mailbox into my profile, and my code can access that way. However, this was done on my desktop with Outlook installed, which provides a richer mail profile editor.
Since this will run on a server, I'd prefer not to install Outlook at all. Instead, I can install the MAPI client. I then create a simple MAPI app that pops up the mail profile wizard using MAPILogonEx() with the MAPI_LOGON_UI flag. However, the basic MAPI client doesn't have the features to configure another user's mailbox. As a requirement, I can only run this script as the service account of the monitoring application, so I cannot tell it to run as the account whose mailbox I want.
Is it still possible to connect to another user's mailbox (assuming permissions are already granted) using the basic MAPI client? Or is it absolutely necessary to install Outlook for this functionality?
I would strongly recommend using the Microsoft Exchange MAPI Client (as you have linked). It is engineered to be far more robust than the Outlook version of these libraries. You should find the API no different between Outlook and Exchange Server with respect to Extended MAPI.
You will need to use Extended MAPI (as described by Cain T S Random) to open other mail stores, and of course your application will need to be logged in as the Windows user with appropriate permissions on the Exchange server.
I see... I'm not sure how to do that explicitly; that's usually a side effect of calling CreateStoreEntryID with the wrong flags. What's you're looking to do is probably:
Get an IID_IExchangeManageStore from your default message store
Call CreateStoreEntryID
Then open that store by the entry ID
LPEXCHANGEMANAGESTORE mapiObject = NULL;
store->QueryInterface( IID_IExchangeManageStore, (LPVOID *) &mapiObject);
mapiObject->CreateStoreEntryID( server, mailbox, OPENSTORE_TAKE_OWNERSHIP |
OPENSTORE_USE_ADMIN_PRIVILEGE, &len, &buffer);
//Call OpenEntry on the entry id
If you want a more detailed example, search the source of the MFC MAPI project for CreateStoreEntryID. If you have other questions, the best place to get them answered is the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.messaging newsgroup.
Have you looked into ConfigureMsgService? I believe that works with Exchange MAPI, or are you saying you tried that and it didn't work?

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