What Would You Want From ColdFusion Microsoft Exchange Integration?

I also like the idea of having IMAP built-in to ColdFusion, but look at the marketing facts. Exchange is a huge player in the world of IT. Sure, there are a few other systems: Notes and Groupwise, so maybe their integration will come later. At some point, CF cannot continue to *not* have a specialized implementation such as an Exchange connector. I'm no marketer, but I do see a huge potential with native Exchange functionality in CF. Our former Asst VP of IT is a HUGE Microsoft fan. I'm sure there are many of those people out there who are making the final decision. Logic dictates that these Microsoft fans will take a second look at CF if it plays well with one of the Microsoft flagship products. Sorry if I sound selfish, but I personally don't care much about non-Windows platforms. We are a Microsoft shop and I see no need to switch platforms anytime soon or in the future. So, Adobe, please give me some great integration with our enterprise groupware. M!ke

I'd love the functionality, especially since we are getting the 2yr subscription this time. IMAP, not such a big deal to me. Creating meeting requests and reading the accept/deny results and the ability to update Distribution Lists would be my top 2 requests.

i support Tariq's idea and would definitely go for CFIMAP tag !

I'd like to also throw my vote in for IMAP support.

Maybe I've been outside of Lockheed for too long, but Exchange integration... meh... Haven't had access to an exchange server in many years. Imap support would be great though. How bout better Acrobat integration ;) Seriously though, I'd like to see CF having full control over pdf, ala the iText libraries.

Yet another CFIMAP vote. I know Windows is a often used Hosting Platform - but please don't do Exchange only extensions and forget other platforms... And if you going to implement exchange integration make it work on ALL CF supported platforms.

We had been doing our Exchange integration using CDO via COM. With CFMX, COM is just not preferable anymore (at least for us). However, I noticed there is a cdo.jar file in the lib directory of our CFMX install. Using some of the j-integra examples I found, I was able to cobble together a working script that sends mail through our Exchange servers by instantiating the com.intrinsyc.cdo classes inside CF. However, I have concerns that this might be considered using "undocumented" features? I posted a question like this on the Macromedia developer forums, but no one answered it. I know the J-integra classes were OEM'd for COM integration, but it seems like the J-Integra CDO code is there as well. Is using it still playing by the "rules"?

I would definitely love to help testing the MS Exchange (MSX) integration with Scorpio! As far as my list goes (not in any order): 1. DON'T make this a CF Enterprise-only feature, PLEASE!!! Many small shops can not afford CF Enterprise, even though they can afford Exchange. 2. Fast IMAP access. With MSX, IMAP is not a speedy protocol especially with a folder that contains many email messages. Use CFX_IMAP4 as a control. It's pretty fast in itself, but the bottleneck is MSX. 3. Full, if possible, MAPI access. Bascially, give me the same abilities that Outlook has. If Outlook can do it, give us the ability from CF. 4. CF must understand the difference between objects in folders. For example, normally, the Inbox contains messages. However, you can drag other types of mailbox objects into a mail folder. I refer to the Message Classes. Google "IPM." for examples. CF must know that appointment items contain attributes that messages don't. Basically, most objects inherit from message objects. 5. CF must understand the flags within messages. These flags include items such as importance, appointment labels, custom fields (usually accessed as an array using an integer value). 6. This is somewhat an AD/LDAP request, but it would be absolutely great if CF would handle recursive group membership retrieval. 7a. CF must understand recurring appointments. We should have the ability to retrieve the recurring settings. For example, CF should be able to say "Repeats Every Monday From Jan 1, 2005 to Dec 31, 2005" (or something like that). 7b. CF should not require us to "build" the recurrance when retrieving appointments from the MSX database. For example, if an MSX calendar contains an appointment that repeats every Monday, CF should return an array, or query, that already calculates all recurrances and not just the first occurance. 8. Many of the previous suggestions can be fulfilled with a simple LDAP query. You should consider this fact before building a native function within CF. Exceptions are welcome if the native function would improve performance or coding as opposed to an LDAP tag. 9a. I want the ability to traverse through a mailbox to get a hierarchy of the folders, regardless of depth, and return a message count and relative folder size for each folder. I wrote an ASP page that does just this, but it is a pain to code and maintain. CF should make this very easy. 9b. CF should be able to quickly get a total size for each mailbox w/o having to traverse each folder in each mailbox. The MSX system admin console can do this now. We don't need an exact up-to-the-second report. We just need a pretty-recent report. 10. Creating mailboxes is a snap, using LDAP. I want to be able to remove mailboxes once they are no longer needed. I want to create a custom MSX administration application to improve the life of our MSX administrator. In other words, I want CF to give me the ability to control a mailbox through its entire lifetime. 11. Let CF compact, repair, report mailserver/mailbox/storage group status/health, etc. 12. CF can get quite a bit of information about MSX storage groups and mailbox stores from AD using LDAP. It would be nice to make this information eaily available with a native function in CF. I built a CF-based app that lets users see why their mailbox is full and can't send/receive messages. It also shows their mailbox size and if the size is a default or not. 13. A MSX gateway would be awesome. It could respond to certain MSX events such as when the mailbox store gets to a certain limit. A gateway that could react to an appointment reminder would be great. Not everyone has a PDA that can sync to Outlook/MSX. The gateway could send a SMS/IM to the mobile device to warn of an upcoming meeting if the person is away from their desktop. 14. Currently, I have a web app (built with classic ASP) that queries a mailbox's calendar, retrieves all events and then stores them in a SQL database. Then, our web servers pull from the quick database rather than the slower MSX server. The main problems are CF does not currently support CDO integration (CF5 did, however) and that the ASP page must be run on the mail server itself. Therefore, CF MUST be able to connect to a "remote" mail server and not need to be installed on the mail server itself. 15. I repeat. PLEASE DON'T make this a CF Enterprise-only feature!!! 16. Make it easy to create additional email addresses for a mailbox while checking for uniqueness in the AD. (I built a tool that does this, but it's a booger.) 17. Give CF the ability to easily maintain permissions in MSX, or any AD object, for that matter. For example, I want to create a generic, non-human mailbox and then give access to a domain group. 18. CF should be able to view/set allowed relays. 19. CF should be able to view/set global message sending/receiving limits. 20. CF should be able to track messages and provide a report. (Refer to MSX Message Tracking) 21. CF should be able to view/set email addresses to block senders. (Sender Filtering) 22. CF should be able to manage any of the installed, known protocols running on an MSX server. Sorry if this list is a bit long, but you asked for it. ;^) M!ke

An idea we will soon be exploring is how to integrate Outlook with attendance. Allowing an employee to make a request for absence. Manager approving the request by viewing a calendar of his/her empoyees to determine if functional requirements will be met. If we could overlay several employees calendars a manager would be able to tell at a glance.

Regarding John Burns: Exactly. This opens up the ability to integrate Exchange into your workflows. If you have an event management tool, bam goes into the calendars of those who have signed up. If you have a ticketing/bug tracking/CRM tool you can bridge that to Exchange by creating tasks that the user has to do... On another note, I'd like to see CF have the ability to build JSR168 portlets.

I work in county government our IT department is primarily a Microsoft development shop so any type of Microsoft integration is a great idea. Exchange integration is something we are really looking for, key needs would be the following. Retrieve mail, calendar information, notes and folders (private, public, shared) Post and update calendar information Post and edit task Search Exchange folders, notes and calendar information Easy for developers to use and administrators to configure.

I second the comments about IMAP and Calendar access. I'd love to be able to let users who are already familiar with the outlook calendar create events that could show up on the website. Same thing goes for contacts. To be able to leverage the list of contacts to either spit out all of the email addresses, search again the different fields within the contact list, etc. Task integration would be very nice if you could have your web application create tasks as necessary for different things. For instance, if you have a web app with an approval process, when something is submitted for approval, you could automatically create a task for the individual telling them to approve it. Not sure if this is possible or not, but it would be neat if they could do simple approvals from the Outlook form itself. I believe that requires messing with outlook though and not so much using CF. It can't hurt to ask though :-)

Ability to integrate with Calendar. Read/Add/Update as well as respond to events from Exchange!

For years I wanted to give intranet websites the ability to have a "click here to add this event/meeting to my calendar" button which would do this instantly and transparently. But then my client dumped Exchange in favour of Lotus Notes. (Yes, I know, I know!) Still this sort of functionality would help to embed CF into intranets where Exchange is used.

It would be nice to be able to access user mailboxes via MAPI in addition to IMAP, but since this is something that can already be done another way, I'd say it's more important to focus on: 1. Read/write access to user calendars 2. Access to public folders (both mail and calendar types) Given those two abilities (and an Exchange administrator who would enable IMAP!) I would be able to do all the Exchange integration that has ever been requested of me.

Just want to ditto some of the others and ask for IMAP support.

I have a couple of applications that may benefit from some kind of Outlook integration. The first one is an in/out board application that displays when someone is out of the office (traveling, vacation, sick, etc.). In addition to the technical challenge of pulling in Outlook schedule information, the other issue with this is that the in/out board is public (inside the company) but calendars are not, so I'm not sure how exactly to determine what Outlook information should or should not be automatically displayed. But the potential for eliminating redundant work for employees is there. The other application is a "travel orders" system that employees use to get approval for business trips. I'd like for this travel information, once approved, to automatically populate their public in/out board entry (which is easy), and also their private Outlook calendar.

It's been awhile since I've used Outlook, so excuse me if some of these things are possible easily with CF/Exchange now. One thing that would be neat, buidling on Fernando's ideas, would be to make a web page that was a one-stop shop for the meeting with the following features: -Attendee list. There'd be the obvious color code for those who accepted the invite and those who didn't. You'd also be able to have a color for those who are double booked, those who have out of office turned on, and, using a gateway interface, find out if they're IM clients are set to away. -"You coming?" With a click of a button on the page, the organizer could send a simple email with the subject of "You coming?". We'd then be able to pull-in the meeting info and plop that into the body. We could also add, "This is an automated email. Please respond with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. The organizer will be given your response in realtime and will know whether to continue or wait for you." The system can then update the attendee list based on that response. -Agenda Items. The cfserver would be able to act as a respository for the files necessary for the meeting, i.e. word docs, power point presentations, etc. -Meeting Notes. Meeting notes could then be typed into the page, stored and made searchable. -Action Items. Action items would then be created during the meeting and added to the responsible person's Calendar and Task sections. -Follow-up. With a few clicks, you could then dispatch a copy of the meeting notes and all files (PPTs, DOCs, etc.) to whoever wanted them. Not to mention during meetings, it's not uncommon for other's peoples names to pop-up. "You know, you should bring Bob the Builder into loop. You'll need sign off from him before you move forward with this." No problem, a quick lookup would find his email and add him to the list. Now, that's just for meetings! =) The possiblities though should be as endless as that.

I would like to second Tariq's call for total access to Exchange, but I would like to add Flex 2 to the mix. I see Flex as the obvious interface to such an application. How cool would it be to drop a calendar component into a Flex application and with a couple lines of code (via a CFC if necessary) have your Outlook calendar available.

Our company has different meeting rooms and even though all reservations are handled by Outlook there's always somebody overstaying in the room while others are waiting. I have always wanted to use Coldfusion to create a page that can go as the background of the desktop. The page would basically tap into Exchange and show all the information regarding the conference room. It could even change colors 15,5 minutes before the time is up. -- in one line: make a feature that allows us to view/update/create Calendar entries in Exchange. thanks

First off, i'd like to say that this is an awesome idea. at my company, we've wanted to integrate with exchange for quite some time now, but not having an easy/quick way to do it has hampered us a bit. We are currently using all the work arounds, ical, vcard, etc. Things i'd like to see: - ability to read, write, delete calendar events within exchange - ability to send calendar events within the exchange format and then track those events and be able to change those events and send out notifications of changes. - support for inset images when working with emails - ability to schedule tasks and reminders. - ability to work with notes. - ability to work with/ update contact information - ability to access/work with/download/upload public file folders I don't really want to duplicate the functionality of an email client. That has little value for us (we use exchange web mail) but the ability to function and interact with exchange and to generate some of these events within the would be a definate plus when it comes to integrating with current user processes.

- Essentially the full ability if you wanted to, to create a Coldfusion based web "outlook" client. I know they have one, but that's an easy way to sum up the powers needed. - Be able to retrieve data from Exchange such as mail, calendar

At first I was thinking about allowing the user the oppurtunity to add to their own calender, but the more I think about it, it would be better to be able to threat the class as a meeting request that the students from the enrollment table are invited to, so that if the time or location changes in the class database table, the students meeting in their outlook calender is updated. It would help with no shows.

We've used ColdFusion to add both contact information, and appointment information to people's private boxes. For example a staff member updates their online directory information, which updates subscribers Exchange contacts, which then gets synched via BlackBerry to their handhelds in a matter of moments. As of now we've had to cludge together a Java based socket connection, and then use WebDav to write the information to Exchange. It works, but it's fragile. It would be nice if ColdFusion could write to an Exchange Store as easily as it writes to other databases. (Even if Exchange still runs on Jet.)

Damien, just to clarfiy, do you want CF to respond to Exchange events (a reminder in Exchange triggers a page to be executed, for example), or do you want CF to be able to create and update events in Exchange? Kathy, do you want ColdFusion to update someone's calendar programatically, or do you just want a way for the user to do something to add an event to Outlook? If the latter, you can do that already, just have CF create a vCal record (Outlook will open it and will allow the user to save the event). I believe there is even a UDF at www.cflib.org that will create the vCal for you (many years ago, in a prior lifetime, I was involved in the vCal RFP, wow, seems like ancient history). Or do you want a way to update Exchange so that users need to nothing, you just add evenst to their calendar programmatically?

Kathy, just create an ICAL file and email it to them, Outlook can import ICAL files but just not syncronize them very well. Damien

Another vote for IMAP support

To read & write calendar and contact info with exchange. Trying to do this now with an Intranet application, reading is working really well with webdav, having problems writing…. Chris

We have Ipswitch's IMail server integrated with our application. Our customers can add domain names to their account, click a button, and have that domain name and their user accounts setup in IMail automatically. When the customer logs into our application it gives them the number of new messages and a link that automatically logs them into the their mailbox. They can adjust their email address, add additional addresses, and adjust spam filtering and virus protection all from our application. The customers that use Outlook to retrieve email never even see an IMail screen. We have over 1,000 domain names in our system and most of them use this email service. We have some larger accounts that would like to use Exchange. I would like the integration to be as complete and easy as we have it with IMail. Even though we wrote all the integration code, it was very simple to do. Exchange has more features, but those additional features comes more complexity working with it programmatically. If CF had tags to do this integration it would be wonderful. Our integration needs are not from an intranet perspective, but an ISP perspective. We need to be able to setup domain names and mailboxes without all the Windows Domains and Users overhead. Our users will not have a Windows Network account. Jason Nokes DistributorCentral, LLC 324 E. Main Gardner, KS 66030 888-516-7402 www.distributorcentral.com jnokes@distributorcentral.com

I have a CF based site that allows users to register for internal training classes. Dates and times for these multiday classes are in the database. So when a user registers for a class I would like to add a link (or button or something) to the confirmation page to allow them to add the classes to their Outlook calender.

CFIMAP is seconded. Damien

How about support for UTF-7? Yes, its a problem with JavaMail, but there's no excuse for CF to not have a five line work-around to at least catch the error and not crash. Next off, the ability to integrate with calendar events. I'd like to be able to schedule events in Exchange that CF could pick up to launch tasks, or something. At the very least, to be able to create and update events programatically. Damien

CFIMAP should definitely be the first thing! Not just for Exchange but for any IMAP account.

I'll ditto the need for IMAP. On specific Exchange information, I think that free/busy status as well as integration with other calendar features would be cool. Although, one big stumbling block that I see is the lack of true passthrough authentication of windows credentials. CF needs to support true integrated windows auth so that the current user would see only what they need to see and not what the coldfusion service is running as.

It seems like it would be optimal to look at whats already been done with Ximian and Novell Evolution for MAPI support etc. The idea of writing directly to the JET database is not-so-good IMHO.

If the way a flight booking is sent as a form becomes standardised, then intergrate cf and Exchage so that this becomes a simple workflow for the approval of a booking.

Yet another vote for IMAP support. IMHO since CF is built to be cross-platform it should support open standards first and proprietary extensions second. Additionally, I'd like to see the ability to perform CRUD on calendar items and contacts.

To expand on a previous concern about this stuff being in the Enterprise version only. How about splitting the difference: All the proposed enhancements are implemented as CF tags in the Standard edition and repeated again in Enterprise, but Enterprise also contains the event gateway equivalents of the same tags. Also a vote for improving the existing LDAP tag, to (optionaly) make it more MS Active Directory specific. For example, apply standard CF formatting to the many date stamp attributes scattered through out AD.

Wow, lots of great feedback. Keep posting ideas and suggestions. The CF team *IS* reading this thread. Also, if you have specific use cases, examples, of how you would use this functionality, please share. So, beyond saying "I want to be able to read and write caledar entries", if you could share how this would be used in your app, in what types of apps, and how it would be used, that would be really useful. And yep, lots of you want IMAP support. Gotcha! :-)

I haven't done anything with LDAP to AD yet so I don't know what is already possible, but CF tag wrappers to this functionality would be welcome from my point of view. Primarily I would be interested in the calendar and task management features of Exchange. Currently my application sends out "to do" emails when certain events happen, things like "Item xyz has arrived at the warehouse, please add to website". I'd love to replace these emails with actual tasks that will show up in Outlook's task bar.

Thanks for the heads up Michael. I'll give it a go. I didn't think it would be that simple. ;)

One other great use for the Exchange integration would be for resource scheduling. For example, our help desk is responsible for scheduling computer carts, LCD projectors and sound systems. I batch-created many Exchange mailboxes to be used for these resources. I would envision a web-based application that would present daily or weekly reports of resource schedules. I don't know if I would go so far as to actually schedule the resources since one person would do that using Outlook, but we do have several people that would need to see the reports.

I would also like to be able to display the current mail queues in Exchange. I want to know how many messages are sitting in the incoming queue and how many are in the outgoing queue. We are using an Exchange plugin for our spam filtering (GFI Mail Essentials) and it tends to slow down the delivery of mail. It would be great to have a web application that would show our help desk any queue bottlenecks in case they get calls about slow delivery.

Mark, can you explain your comment of "I have inherited an intranet where the Exchange Global Address list is used to populate the users login table."? What do you mean the GAL is used to populate a login table?

I'll post a few actual use cases tomorrow when I get back to the office. As far as creating mailboxes, you can already do that using CFLDAP. All you need to do are set a few attributes in AD. Then, Exchange's Remote Update Service (RUS) will create the mailbox based on those attributes. The following are three different combinations of AD attributes that can be used to create an Exchange mailbox. objectCategory objectClass mailnickname msExchHomeServerName or objectCategory objectClass mailnickname homeMdb or objectCategory objectClass mailnickname homeMta As you can see, creating Exchange mailboxes is almost effortless. The difficult, if not impossible, task is removing mailboxes.

It would be nice to see all of the outlook features like IMAP, contacts, calandar, notes, etc integrated into CF. Some third party java products allready do this stuff. i.e. http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/support/exchange/doc/ http://www.syncex.com/support.html I'm currently looking for a way to programatically CRUD exchange mailbox accounts and domains. It would be reaaallly nice if it was integrated into CF, but does anyone know how to do it now or where i should start looking?

From Exchange and Coldfusion integration I would like to be able to: 1. create world peace 2. understand God and the universe 3. never get haemorrhoids If you could organise that into the next major release, it would be great. Thanks, Dex.

I see CF big in intranet and document management possibilites with Adobe on board. So this must intergrate with Exchange Public folders and reminders so that you can put items in / out of public folders and set reminders for people to update docs etc.

The ability to 1. Create Mailboxes (Under specific domain names for multi domain sites) 2. Delete Mailboxes 3. Change Mailbox Details, ie, Name Password etc. This enables a CF portal to hand out exchange email addresses when signing up. Ie say you were developing a portal called iluvcf.com when you sign up you get a free email@iluvcf.com which is an exchange account, thus you get all the lovely Web Access stuff that comes with Exchange

Our exchange server is used for e-mai,fax,sms and voice mail (with Cisco unity and XMedius Fax). We have built an application on our CF based intranet for case management and would like to be able to link any item from an any folder in exchange to it a case and then have some sort of web based viewer where u could pass some sort of exchange GUID to view the information about that item Also be cool would have coldfusion to index exchange and look for customer account numbers or e-mails in the system and automatically attach or link then item to our customers history

I have inherited an intranet where the Exchange Global Address list is used to populate the users login table. Cant we do better than that?

Hi Ben, Greetings from sunny pre-Xmas Melbourne! :) Not relevant to MS Exchange, but still might be worth to consider: 1) cffile action="readbinaryblock" : reading part of binary file into variable; 2) cffile action="writebinaryblock" : writing data into binary file; 3) note : working with huge arrays of data is pretty slow; 4) cfimap for sure; 5) few good tag ideas could be found at www.cftagstore.com: - cfx_exec (more powerful and flexible) - cfx_http5 (same here) - much more at web site... Many thanks in advance.

Ben, My wishlist is the following: CFML side: Be able to create object of type "msbox" that would have getters and setters for folders, notes, calendar, etc... Data should be returned with type of query. Able to filter those different options with optional arguments (eg: filter calendar items). Also an object for Global address list and other server variables and be able to update them (eg:VCards) . Be able to interact with MSExchange with some admin API (like cf one). As Service: An Exchange Gateway that would react to: create, modify, delete mailboxes, DL, notes, contacts, calendar events, tasks... send & recieve emails.

* Support for query access to address books * Calendar access as others have requested. * Ability to log 'stuff' events and what not to the journal would be spiffy. * ability to emulate a MAPI connection to a mailbox would be really swell, give some kind of access to MAPI functions. Of course after authentication as a user. CF_MAPI?

We have an extensive conference room scheduling tool that integrates meeting room calendars, food requests, and equipment requests (i.e. laptop, projector, etc.). If a meeting is scheduled using the online forms, the event should be added to the user's exchange calendar automatically with the right date/time. If the user then modifies the date/time in Outlook, CF should be watching for that event and could then update the online database. This would require CF to be able to push to and pull from Exchange - probably a gateway?

My biggest wishes would be for Contact and Calendar integration.

Ben - What is the new email for the coldfusion wishlist? I realize my wishlist request may be somewhat obscure, but what the "hay" I'll ask anyways. What I really need in the work I do daily, is better integration with PDF Forms. We don't need to generate PDF's on the fly, CFDocument is great in that regards. We work with preformatted PDF Templates. We need a way for Coldfusion to populate these PDF Templates. Sort of what ActivePDF does. However, we don't want to rely on a COM object. Another great feature would be if ColdFusion could directly interact with Adobe's 2D Barcode Forms. This is something else I have been researching for my company. Again there a lot of expensive 3rd party tools that integrate with .Net or PHP, but none that have a CF solution. Whatever solution I found had to again, involve COM objects and the API was not easy to understand. So if we had native CF integration with Adobe's 2D Barcode Forms, that would benefit my business greatly. Thanks! -AA

We're currently using the WebDav protocol to directly connect to exchange and push contacts and appointments into user's folders. However, it takes a good bit of trial and error to get the xml requests working especially when attempting to perform more advanced tasks such as working with recurring appointments. One thing we have wanted to do that we haven't been able to yet is to schedule a recurring appointment and change instances of the appointment based on needs. This would be great in the education arena where scheduling a course on a user's calendar would require it to be one appointment but each instance might be different days/times and the descriptions might be tailored to class content for that instance. Some of the main features I would be interested in are: 1) publishing all types of items (appointments, contacts, tasks, etc) 2) traversing all types of items 3) sending meeting requests

I gotta say that Michael Dawson's list (the big, long one above) is pretty thorough. We have a project lifecycle management and ERP system running entirely on CF now. Internally, it manages calendar events and tasks via the RDBMS (SQL Server), and the built-in email client connects to our IMAP server (non-MSX) via 3rd-party COM objects. So, basically, the function list looks something like Michael's, and the 2 main use cases are: 1. Internal users: Some of our employees prefer to use Outlook for its ease of calendaring and drag-n-drop mail management, but they currently have to duplicate all their calendar events manually. So, this use would benefit from a tag or set of tags for easily communicating events back out to Outlook, with the option to export directly to Outlook (as some have mentioned the iCal or vCard options) or to post directly to an Exchange server for synchronization across MSX clients (Outlook, Palm HotSync, etc.). 2. Customers running Exchange: The GUI for our application has full management of Tasks, Appointments, Facility scheduling, Contacts and Contact Lists (CRM), and Email (both IMAP and POP support), with levels of access by both intranet and extranet users. Currently the app hits an IMAP server for mail and a SQL Server for all the other data, but I would love to be able to offer the option to store all these datatypes directly in a MSX server for clients that already use that platform. Basically, then I could offer our app in 2 different flavors: a) save all your CRM, Tasks, Appts, and Email in MSX, if you want, or b) we'll just save it all to the local SQL Server as we do now, if you don't have or don't want to implement MSX. We could write all those hooks, but it would be huge to us if we didn't have to!

How about Tasks integration, You could have a Help Desk / Bug Tracking system that could then place a task in teh developers / users list?

What about lotus notes integration? :D

Hi Ben- We run ColdFusion in a DMZ to serve web apps to our external customers as well as running it on our intranet. One "killer app" that we have for Exchange integration would be allowing our external clients to schedule their own events via CF and track those events in multiple group calendars on the Exchange server. We need to keep events segregated by customer yet limit the total amount of these events by the techs we have available at the requested time. We would want to see the events in "master" customer-based and tech based schedules. We also are looking for a solution that allows the voting features in Outlook / Exchange to be used to document approval for various change management issues. On the wish list is a way to use CF to integrate SharePoint tasks with Outlook tasks on the Exchange server. Shouldn't be too hard, we already pull SharePoint lists via web services. Oh, a mail listener gateway would be really nice. Right now we run a script that hits a CF web service via HTTP POST which then wakes up CF and has it check its mail. Thanks for listening! ~S

The type of functionality that we need from CF-MS Exchange integration includes (and forgive me, CF-MSX may be able to do some of the following already): - Ability to post tasks to an Exchange Public Folder as well as an individual's Outlook personal folder (so long as the share permissions are given) - Ability to interact with contacts and calendars - Ability to track and keep a copy of emails sent to clients with date and time stamp When could we expect 'Scorpio' to be released...worst case scenario? Thank you, Michael Ryan The V-M Group

be able to interact with the GAB

Ben, We would like to see the ability to: 1) read the calendar for free/busy schedule info for event planning 2) directly add calendar appointments 3) read and add contacts 4) be notified of changes to calendar information that were created by our product Thank you,

At my company, we use CFLDAP, Windows-integrated authentication, and the microsoft.xmlhttp object to talk to Exchange on our intranet. We've been doing this since CF5 and it works fine; we display public folder data on the home page of our intranet. The next higher level would be to be able to put events on people's personal calendars from a web app, assign tasks to them, etc. Right now we don't write to the Exchange server at all in our apps, just read from it, and we only interact with public folders, not user folders. If there was a simple API to do this, we would.

Another vote for easily reading and writing calendar data.

I agree with pretty much all of the requests, but the one single biggest thing people request in our company is to see someone's Free/Busy schedule. I can't believe MS hasn't built an easy way to publish this via the web into Exchange. It would be great if you could look at (not update or modify, mind you) someone's calendar in a nicely formatted calendar grid/layout. How I would want this to work would be. 1. I can give others view-only permission to see my calendar. 2. I could give various viewing rights to users. For example; a. Public access: See only blocks of time I'm free/busy (i.e., can't see any event details and only color codes dates/times I'm busy) b. Manager access: See same as A and also see event titles. c. Executive Management access: See all details of schedule. 3. I can give read/write access to my calendar to select users (like my secretary) so they can update my schedule. I have so many managers asking they have the ability to publish their free/busy information over the web it makes my head spin.

I know this wishlist entry is kind of old, but right now I'm working with Java classes in one of my CF scripts and it's brought a few things to my attention. I wish that CF would allow wildcards when creating Java objects. For instance: something = createobject( "java", "java.class.*" ) That way, we would import all classes under one package. Java has done this since day one and I use it when writing JSPs. Since CF is built on top of J2EE this shouldn't be such a far-fetched idea. Thanks!

Amir, I can't comment on any Scorpio specifics yet, but based on the responses to this and other threads, it is high on the list of features tro be considered. --- Ben

Ben , Will you please update us on MS Exchange connectivity features of Scorpio? Is Adobe planning to add it to the next release? If yes what level CF will connect to Exchange? WebDAV? by CDO using Java? anything else? That helps us direct our current developments. Thank you

For CFIMAP, an important capability would be to establish secure connections like SSL or TLS.

Similar to Cole's comment above: I'd like to see a modification of cfimport or a new tag so I don't have to use fully qualified component names in cfobject tags. <cfimport package="com.adobe.util.*" /> or something simple like that would be nice.

I'll throw in my vote for the ability to add/modify/remove tasks and calendar entries via. CF. I just skimmed the thread (sorry, it's 70 comments long!), so I'm not sure if anyone requested access to some of the other features of Exchange server list the "out-of-office" notification, or the in/out board. We used to run an open source IMAP server at work, and have recently "upgraded" to Exchange. Us Mac users have been screwed a bit in the process. To set up an e-mail auto-reply, we used to use a web page. That's gone now with Exchange. You can go into the web-based Exchange interface and do it, but the interface is pretty bad in any browser other than IE (non-ActiveX). I'd love to be able to offer the web-based auto-reply setup again.

ive got it. a tag called cfoutlookvcs... basically generate an .vcs file that can be email for outlook calander invites. Hmmm... maybe I will make the custom tag for it....

I often think the reason why microsoft hasn't created a mass import tool for exchange is because they could never get it to work correctly... blah blah.

I have been able to add directly to the active directory using Coldfusion Ldap command, however creating an exchange address is a trick. I had to write a coldfusion application that wrote .vbs script and executed the .vbs script to turn on the exchange email ability. It really sucked. To be honest, programming directly into the active directory was a nightmare. Once you start messing around with the global address book you are playing with disaster. We had cached versions of address books becoming corrupted. We resorted to the old method after initually getting everyone into the active directory and let a low level SA update it.

I vote for the ability to add Calendar events to Exchange/Outlook through a ColdFusion application. We actaully need this functionality right now! Does anyone have a Kludge to get this working right now?

The ability to add, edit and remove calendar entries and contacts into private calendars and contact lists. I have a team based intranet site and when one user updates a calendar entry it would be nice if the other team members calendars were updated automatically.

I also vote for the ability to add Calendar events to Exchange/Outlook through a ColdFusion application. We use our Exchange Calendars for all our meetings and I'd like to send a request via an email.

My company is desperately trying to find a way to schedule their engineers and share parts of that schedule with customers. I have a couple of open-source calendar applications I'm toying with but neither use components or CFMX 7 features at all. I would want to be able to create, manage, publish and confirm single and recurring events for engineers at client sites. The client would then be able to see their scheduled coverage dynamically anytime. we currenty fight with exchange to do this but coldfusion would make the whole thing more dynamic. If there were coldfusion tags that enabled us to manage events as easily as we can manage any other coldfusion task, that would open the door. and how would that be done if the coldfusion server was remote from the exchange server?

OOps, i meant to say CDO.cfc

This is great news. I've had a IMAP.cfc in development for a while but experienced a lot of issues from varying Exchange implementations which has pushed the release out. It's also a bit of a performance hog. It would be nice to forego this altogether and just do it natively in CF. I think the most important things are being able to access calendar, contacts, tasks, notes and (less importantly to me) email. Having access to public folders with the ability to post files to them could also be valuable. Also, being able to utilize the built-in exchange security, from a read-only perspective would be very helpful. This would enable the sharing of Exchange items in web apps as they are configured in exchange. This would be a huge boon to Flex applications and potentially Apollo-based aps!

The key is using the sAMAccountName for the user you're looking up, and use the username / password of an Admin account which allowed to query the user's data. The following works for us against an ActiveDirectory repository. <cfldap action="QUERY" name="ldapSearch" attributes="uid,dn,displayName" start="dc=domainserver,dc=domain,dc=com" scope="SUBTREE" server="servername.domainserver.domain.com" port="389" filter="sAMAccountName=username@domain.com" username="myAdminUserName" password="myAdminPassword" > HTH, J

Can't get attributes back from Active Directory using CFLDAP. Can't find any forums with the answer. Do you know what I am doing wrong? <cfldap action="QUERY" name="GetUserInfo" attributes="cn,sn,email,memberOf" start="cn=users,dc=xxx,dc=org" server="server" username="name@xxx.org" password="password" scope="base" >

We are MSX and MSO all the way. However, we need to show our management MSX metrics and the prefered methos is a web-page on the intranet they can pull up at any time and get both real-time and historical usage and status information. So anything that will let us tap into MSX logs or object properties (user mailbox size, for example) via CF tags would be great!

I have thought over your perspective that CFExchange is dominant on the market. Yes, they are! So is dotNet. If people install exchange they are also installing dotNet. There are many solutions that don't require installation of the trojan horse if we provided IMAP solutions. :) I think that has some valid argument to it also.

One specific example is allowing recipients of college recruitment emails to immediately schedule an appointment based on the free/busy time of the admissions representative who sent the email. The college gets the highest conversion rates if an appointment is scheduled within 24 hours after the email is sent. Having access to free/busy information would allow appointments to be requested/scheduled after-hours and on weekends/holidays.

Oh, let's just say that this thread was started during Scorpio planning, and Scorpio is not yet out, and this thread was indeed given serious attention. Stay tuned. --- Ben

So how close are we to seeing this integration become reality? All I see here is a wish list that started back in 2005. Is anybody listening to you or was this just a trap?

Well, someone was nice enough to send me a response to my comment. I actually was pretty close to getting it to run but then I got caught up when I was trying to do my https stuff and didn't get it to work. We then tried to use linked tables in SQL Server 2000 and we had issues linking to the table after we tried to set it up. In any case, I might turn back to the coldfusion method that Terrence was nice enough to send me. The link can be found at: http://www.numtopia.com/terry/code_exchange_item_creator.cfm

Well, I don't know when your version will come out, how much it will cost (if it is included in new software) or anything about it. So, since I want it to work now, I would like to place my destiny in my own hands to the extent to which it is possible. If I want to access ADO, is that pretty much out of bounds in Cold Fusion? I figure I could try to create a web service in .net that can use ADO but I have to figure some way to compile it.

Scott, you mean do it the hard way? Nah, wait until you see what we've been cooking up! ;-) --- Ben

Ben, I have seen people with PHP make it work? Couldn't we just apply whatever concepts they use and translate it to coldfusion?

I 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ........ Lotus Notes. Yes, I hate it. Yes, I'm stuck with it. Please make my life easier.

Man oh man. I saw the Scorpio stuff in action just the other evening and the Exchange integration is SWEET! Ben hooked into Exchange and updated a calendar with like half a line of code or something (I was on my second Corona, and I'm a lightweight, so the code thing was kinda blurry). The .Net integration is simply incredible. There's simply NO other way to get this much functionality so simply, elegantly, and cleanly.

Chris, yep, we've been demoing the Exchange integration for a while now, and yes, much of what it does it directly the result of this thread. --- Ben

Okay Ben, Now that Scorpio 8 is around the corner and you and Tim Buntel have been road showing it... it's time to update the thread and let us in on the juicy details that have come from all of these discussions and wish lists... What gives Ben :O) are these wishes now realities in Scorpio...??? Thanks for listening again to the community!!! Regards, Chris

#ERROR!

BTW... just kidding Adobe about 8.1 before we get a rumor mill going. (Though I would like to see a community project going to do it... this doesn't have to be part of the core.)

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/sync-your-inbox-across-devices-with.html OK... now let's not say "We told Adobe so..." ... but we did! IMAP is a universal standard. Exchange was a good move, but neglecting IMAP is starting to show it's face. Let's say it's time for CF 8.1 to go into beta and see this situation corrected. :)

for everyone asking fir cfimap - have you used the cf_imap custom tag released on one of the macromed dev kits? It works. about as good as the old cfpop tag (i know the cfpop tag has had a great deal of work done to it since it was introduced). the only issue i ever had with CF_IMAP was that it didnt like emails with no subject. but it wasnt encoded so i could fix that. - not sure if it could create folders tho. but it wouldnt be hard to extend the tag.

I am working on a site where users can generate a list of names and email addresses from a SQL database base on a criteria page. I want to be able to take this list and somehow EITHER convert into .msg file and send it as an attachment to them so that when they click on the attachment, they can access the distribution list they create OR have a button on the page that creates a distribution list on their outlook. Can this be done now? if so how and if not, this is the feature I would be interested in.

Is there any way for coldfusion to be able to interact with exchange sever and retrieve emails in the public folder directory. I've tried using the new cf8 <CfExchangemail> tags but that only works for folders in my personal mailbox. Its seems like the new tags can do so much but not able to read the public folders. I've been pulling my hair out for 2 days so far with this problem. Any suggestion would be much appreciated.

Another vote for IMAP support!

I have been looking to see if there is a way to access public folders as well, any solution to this? My Google ramblings haven't been that successful. I am impressed with how quickly I can access and get a query of my own calendar, now looking to access a public calendar for meeting rooms. Any help appreciated :-)

I receive many emails with entity id, entity names etc. Currently I have to forward these mails to certain people one by one manually. I'm wondering if I can create Cf app., read the subject of these particular emails, grab these emails content and forward them as a bulk. Is that possible? and do you have examples?