Outlook 2007 Add-in: Active Directory & CRM Resolver [by David Rousset]

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Resource Page Description
This VSTO 2008 Outlook sample Add-in will show you an interesting implementation of the OBA concept.

First aim is to grab information from the Active Directory on the emails' senders to display their name, title, phone number and picture. Thanks to that, you will then establish quick VO/IP calls or chat sessions using unified communication provided by Exchange 2007 and Communicator 2007. Moreover, being able to discover the face of your colleagues is something really cool!

Second aim is to extract details from a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 base for external emails. It will help you to gain a lot of time as you'll have access almost in real time on information about your customers and partners. Moreover, you'll also be able to give them a call in a single click via VO/IP just after having received their emails.

Technologies used in this sample:
- VSTO 3/Visual Studio 2008 SP1
- Outlook 2007
- WPF & ElementHost to display the pictures on a 3D animated cube (thanks to the Fluidkit library : https://www.codeplex.com/fluidkit)
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 WebService
- Background Workers to do the resolving job on a second thread
- System.DirectoryServices

Check out my blog : https://blogs.msdn.com/davrous for screenshots and pointers to MSDN articles explaining how this add-in works and how to set it up on your own environment.

A French MSDN article with a video is available here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/cc948938.aspx . This article explains how it works, the basic architecture of the add-in and how to setup this add-in against your own CRM 4.0 environnement.

David Rousset