Automatically connecting a sharepoint contact list to exchange

Question

I've got a project where we need to replace a number of public folders at a company and each public folder is currently using a custom outlook form.

I am leaning towards using SharePoint Contact lists to do this. I know that you can manually connect a SharePoint contact list to Outlook using the SharePoint ribbon button.

However, there are a large number of users at this company and we would like to automate this.

Is there a way to automatically connect a SharePoint contact list to Outlook by using Exchange server?

Answer 1

I have 2 computers, one with outlook, connected to exchange, with sharepoint lists. The other was just stand alone outlook. I added an exchange account to the second computer, and the sharepoint lists from the first were copied to it.

So i think this means that the sharepoint list settings are stored somewhere in exchange. But where they are stored, i could not find. There are a few ways to access exchange data.

http://weblogs.asp.net/whaggard/archive/2007/01/30/how-do-i-access-my-outlook-contacts-from-my-web-application.aspx

I tried Exchange Web Services (2007 SP1), but could only really get the default exchange store for a user. And it had no sharepoint sync data in it i could see. The ExchangeSyncData and Subscriptions folders were empty where i expected at least some items of configuration.

If you have 2010, i would try this new method to see if it gets you the sharepoint list settings of a folder.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg274403%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx

Failing that, you could create the contacts in exchange with:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/lukeb/archive/2010/01/12/powershell-and-ews-how-to-update-contacts.aspx

It must be noted that if you use sharepoint lists for contacts then i dont think they will appear in OWA or the GAB