Import/Sync Contacts from SQL Server to Outlook

Question

Essentially I have a SQL Server (2008) database that contains contact information (among other things), and would like to provide the ability to view these contacts in Outlook. Outlook 2003 must be supported at minimum. The Outlook clients are connected to Exchange, so having the contacts available in Exchange (and then viewable via Outlook) would work as well.

The sync or import would be one-way, from the database to Outlook/Exchange, so the contacts in Outlook/Exchange could be read-only (or changes could be discarded during import).

I think best case would be that Outlook/Exchange reads from the database in real time, so that if changes are made to the database they are immediately visible when they are accessed. However, if this is not possible (I suspect it's not), the user could either click a button, the sync could happen periodically, or it could happen on Outlook start-up.

Not necessarily looking for a complete solution, just thoughts on an approach to take, and any resources with basic code samples.

Answer 1

You could look into Outlook 2003 VBA to do this. Many years ago I used (misused?) Outlook VBA to read some data from a database. I don't know how far VBA would get you (and each user would have to install the VBA code on their Outlook client), but it's a place to start looking, anyway.

Answer 2

There are several technologies you can use:

• Exchange 2010 Web Services. Use your favourite SOAP/XML toolkit (like WCF) to manipulate exchange objects, including Contacts. See Working with Contacts for code samples.
• Exchange 2003/2007 Collaboration Data Objects (COM), see an example on Creating a Contact in the Exchange Store or this for 2007
• WebDAV (HTTP requests) for Exchange 2003/2007 see Creating a Contact in the Exchange Store (WebDAV) or this for 2007

In addition there are client technologies around the Office object model and Outlook, but those would add contacts to individual Outlook address books, not to the central exchange store (ie. not available to the entire org).