Outlook 2003 Calendar in asp.net app

[dpdougla]

I have already asked this question on another forum and it was suggested that I post this question on this forum. So this is a copy and paste job.

I have the task of creating user control (asp.net) that will access the logged in user's outlook calendar and display it on the page. This will be a custom web page for the user when he/she opens the company's intranet site.

I've done lots of work in vba (or whtever you call it in .net) but I have no idea where to start looking for code samples for this kind of automation. I would imagine that the code would go beyond the tips here, but I would appreciate just a pointer in the right direction.

Thanks!

 

[jmeckley]

you will need to extract the data from outlook. that operation is completely independent of asp.net.

once you have that data you will want to display it on the webpage. this is where asp.net (webforms) comes into play.

somethings to consider:
are all calendar events hosted on exchange? if not how will you access the clients calendar?

Is it practical? between OWA and Outlook, what value is there to creating an webpage to show dates?

OWA may provide a web API to pull the dates, if so can do this without the need for asp.net all together by using client scripting (javascript) to pull the data.

Jason Meckley
Programmer

faq855-7190
faq732-7259

 

[dpdougla]

At this point my task is merely researching the most viable route to take considering our situation and circumstances.

The only two things we are considering to add to the company's intranet site at this point would be a calendar (with Outlook data) and the ability to schedule appointments.

Using outlook application objects is not an option since some users would connect via a vpn and it is not guaranteed that Outlook would be installed on their laptops; it is also not installed on the server.

1) We need to find out if it would be an issue to access through code data from the Exchange server.

2) The next thing we need to decide is if there is some kind of "plugin" we could obtain or if we would have to program our own. Whichever way we went with it the page would have to be populated with the data extracted from Exchange.

3) The other possibility we thought of was that of embedding Outlook Web Access objects into our pages -- I have been told that this is possible.

The whole idea behind this would be to personalize the company's interanet site to make it more useful for users.

If anyone has any suggestions as to which way to go to reseach some of these options it would be appreciated greatly.

Thanks!