Exchange 2003 - which API to use to find out room/resource availability?

Question

I need to expose room availability information from a web service that will be consumed by a number of other applications. The availability information is stored within Exchange 2003, and can be viewed using Outlook 2003/2007 today.

What API or Web Service (if available) should I be using to get to this information? I imagine that I could use the Outlook API to get at it, but that is not feasible in this situation. It is also impossible to upgrade to Exchange 2007 or newer at this time. I'd like to write the application in C#, but assume the general APIs may be COM-based.

Answer 1

Here's an article that lists some of the possible APIs you can use.

Here's some others:

• Creating Appointments and Meeting Requests (uses CDO)
• Creating and Appointment (WebDav)

Answer 2

'OpenChange' might be of interest to you: I believe their MAPI library is fairly powerful.

The library is in C, but I believe they also provide bindings for other languages such as C++ and Python.

I'm not entirely sure whether they support viewing other calendars than your own, but I expect so. You'd have to check.

Answer 3

I've been working quite a lot with exchange and outlook, and my experience is that exchange is a better API to work against than outlook if you just need to pull or put data. I also recomende the "new" managed api that comes with exchange 2007/2010 it's really a new and better world :)