Manipulating Exchange 2003 shared contacts folder remotely

Question

I've got a CRM web app running on a remote server that needs to synchronise it's contacts with the in-house Exchange 2003 shared contacts.

Exchange 2003 doesn't appear to support web services. What would the typical approach to this problem be? My initial instinct would be to open port 80 on the Exchange server, run a simple webserver, POST to it and then control Exchange via OLE automation scripting (if that's what people are still calling it!) but there might be a better solution I'm not aware of.

Any suggestions?