Question Synchronising with Microsoft Outlook

[grd09]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction. I know you can use the outlook objects to access the required properties/methods for any of the components (Calendar, Contacts etc). But I'm hoping that someone might be aware of a third party tool that might get me 80% there for synchronizing contacts, calendar appointments and tasks with our own in house windows application in vb.net and MySQL database.

In our own application we have a diary and would like to synchronize between outlook calendar to incorporate any changes to each.

I have tried using Google and the likes to find something but I've had no luck, so any help would greatly appreciated.

Thank you

GRD

 

[ss7thirty]

They do have an API for you to do this yourself. I am not sure about there being a tool that would do everything for you because your needs would be specific to your application and that is why they provide an API for you to program what you need from outlook. What exactly would you expect this third-party tool to do?

 

[JaedenRuiner]

I would agree that there isn't much of anything out there defaultly, however, with Interop services it would be a rather straightforward object to design that would interface with Outlook and either grab new data not existing in your proprietary software and set/add the new data from your software into Outlook.

I will warn you, however, that the access of certain objects in Outlook (2003 and later) are protected by the most heinous dialogs to prevent automation based viruses from spamming your email contacts, so some of this might be better not handled through Outlook automation but through an actual parser that manipulates the direct address book files and such.

Good luck, though, sounds like an interesting project.