SharePoint and Exchange InterOp
At Tech Ed today, I attended an interesting session that Scott Jamison of Dell gave. In it, he demonstrated some code that he wrote to provide for integration with Exchange from SharePoint. The things he wanted to accomplish were to aggregate Exchanges Tasks, SharePoint tasks and custom tasks from a home grown system. He used Portal Server's Single Sign On Service to retrieve credentials for the home grown app, and he used WebDAV to retreive tasks from Exchange. He then pulled those tasks together into a DataSet along with SharePoint tasks and displayed them to the user in a web part. Interesting concepts.

He also wanted to provide a way for users to ask for SharePoint Search results via email. This addresses a case where users are offline frequently and don't have easy access to a SharePoint site. He wrote a Windows System app that polls an Exchange Public Folder. Users can send an email to this folder with a search term in the subject. The Windows Service picks up that message, submits a search request to the SharePoint Search.ASMX web service. He the grabs the URL of the returned search items to retrieve the document, and then generates an email that is sent back to the user. The email includes the top 3 documents as attachments.

This was another interesting concept, but the code isn't quite ready for prime time. Security issues abound, for example, what if a spammer sends messages to this folder...

The session didn't necessarily introduce new capabilityes that I hadn't seen before, but did show some new ways of utilizing those capabilities. I'm looking forward to experimenting with some of this code when I get back to KC.