[Zope-dev] Zope and Outlook

Paul Everitt paul@zope.com
Wed, 19 Jun 2002 10:09:40 -0400


Add a fourth to your list: WebDAV, which is making progress towards 
replacing the  native Exchange protocol.  I have a book on building 
exchange applications that documents this pretty well.  Greg Stein, as 
OSCOM in Zurich, gave a talk in which he noted Microsoft's intentions to 
do this.

In fact, this is the way that Ximian avoided reverse-engineering the 
Exchange protocol in Ximian Connector.  If you install the Outlook Web 
Access support in Exchange 2000, you turn on DAV as an API for Exchange.

You want the reverse, though, and I Outlook (AFAIK) isn't able to create 
a folder that is pointed at an Exchange-via-DAV source.  Thus, you'd 
have to do some scripting.  But that's a lot easier (and less prone to 
crashes) than writing a MAPI source, I believe.

MS has an ADO provider for DAV, so you could treat this as integrating 
ADO and Outlook.  I spent some time over Christmas doing some Python 
scripting of Outlook data.

--Paul

douwe@oberon.nl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not really sure if this is the right place to discuss this, so if you
> think I should go somewhere else, let me know.
> 
> Zope can be used for a lot of different purposes, but one of them definitely
> is groupware and there a lot of people I have been trying to convince to use
> Zope prefer Exchange for the simple reason of integration with Outlook.
> 
> Now, Outlook is not as closed as you might expect and I have been thinking
> about ways to integrate Outlook with Zope. If you could make Outlook
> cooperate with Zope in a way that Outlook would create and use public
> folders that are stored on Zope, lots of really interesting applications
> would be possible, ie like sharing agenda's and having a zope interface to
> it too for html rendering and allowing emails to be moved from outlook
> directly to Zope.
> 
> I see three strategies to achieve this:
> 1) Add a MAPI server interface to Zope. With a plug in for Outlook like the
> one from Bynari Outlook users could then manipulate Zope objects. The MAPI
> interface would have to render Zope objects as MAPI folders and messages.
> 
> 2) Reverse engineer Exchange and implement the relevant MAPI interfaces in
> Zope. This would be the most transparent way, but it would also be very
> complicated and would depend a lot on the whims of Microsoft as far as
> interface changes go, never a very confortable position.
> 
> 3) Write a plug in a la Bynari's InsightConnector, but then one that doesn't
> communicate with MAPI, but directly with Zope, using one of the standard by
> Zope supported protocols.
> 
> So, I would prefer the third one, but I don't have much of clue how to do
> this. Does anybody have any pointers where to start, ie documents or example
> implementations. Are there any projects like this already going on?
> 
> Any help is appreciated.
> 
> Douwe Osinga
> 
> 
> 
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