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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Setting up Exchange Server
  3. Connecting to an Exchange server
  4. Retrieving Items From Exchange
  5. Creating and Editing Exchange Items

Using ColdFusion 8 with Microsoft Exchange Server

Setting up Exchange Server

You might be wondering how and why you would want to use ColdFusion to work with a Microsoft Exchange Server.  I'd like to explain a few scenarios which led me to my use of it.

One of the first applications that I developed was an intranet application that allowed employees to go online and schedule their yearly performance evaluation.  The application showed the employee a list of available times from which he/she selected a time.  The manager, who performs the evaluation then received an e-mail with the details and an attachment that the employee could open and import in his/her Outlook calendar. Each manager was responsible for maintaining his/her list of available time slots through a web interface I developed.  Unfortunately, since few managers were comfortable with using anything outside of the Microsoft Office Suite, they would often send me a list of changes and ask me to edit the information in the application.

In another scenario (part of the public facing website for the same company), there was a page for prospective students to request information from the Education Department. This process simply output the person's request in an e-mail that was sent to the manager of the Education Department; oftentimes, however, the e-mail would get buried under other e-mails in the manager's inbox.

At the time, I remember thinking: "There has got to be an better way."  Unfortunately, without navigating through the quagmire that is the Microsoft Exchange Server LDAP structure, there wasn't.  However, with the release of ColdFusion 8, developers have a whole new set of tools which allow you to quickly, and easily interact with Microsoft Exchange Server.  In this article I show you the code that I would have used to revise the applications described above with the new cfexchange tags in ColdFusion 8.

To communicate with your Exchange server using ColdFusion, you must make sure that your Exchange server is configured to allow access to ColdFusion by ensuring that the following conditions are met:

  • The Exchange server, Exchange access, and Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) are configured in the Internet Information Server (IIS). This is done on the server that is running Exchange.
  • The Exchange server enables Outlook Web Access to all login users.
  • If you are using HTTPS to log into your Exchange server, you must have a valid client certificate in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) certificate store.
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