Best way to access Exchange using PHP?
I'm writing a CMS application in PHP and one of the requirements is that it must be able to interface with the customer's Exchange server. I've written up this functionality a few times before and have always used WebDAV to do it, but now I'm leaning away from that.
I will be running the site on IIS OR Apache (no preference) on Windows server 2008. A few things I would need to do include adding contacts to a given user's address book, sending emails as a given user and running reports on contacts for a user.
All of this is pretty easy to do with WebDAV, but if there is a better way that doesn't require any functionality that is likely to be deprecated any time soon.
Any ideas?
Update:
Justin, I love the idea of using com objects, I just worry about maintaining a 3rd product to make everything work...
John, I can write a web service in C# to interface with for these functions and access it with my PHP app, but it's also a little bit out of the way.
So far, I'm not 100% convinced that either of these is better than WebDAV...
Can anyone show me where I'm being silly?
Answer
Update as of 2020:
Over a decade since this question and things have moved on. Microsft now has a Rest API that will allow you to easily access this data.
Original Answer
I have not used PHP to do this but have experience in using C# to achieve the same thing.
The Outlook API is a way of automating Outlook rather than connecting to Exchange directly. I have previously taken this approach in a C# application and it does work although can be buggy.
If you wish to connect directly to the Exchange server you will need to research extended MAPI.
In the past I used this wrapper MAPIEx: Extended MAPI Wrapper.
It is a C# project but I believe you can use some .NET code on a PHP5 Windows server. Alternatively it has a C++ core DLL that you may be a able to use. I have found it to be very good and there are some good example applications.
Sorry for the delay no current way to keep track of posts yet.
I do agree adding more layer on to your application and relying on 3rd party code can be scary (and rightfully so.)
Today I read another interesting post tagged up as MAPI that is on a different subject. The key thing here though is that it has linked to this important MS article. I have been unaware of the issues until now on using managed code to interface to MAPI although the C++ code in the component should be unaffected by this error as it is unmanaged.
This blog entry also suggests other ways to connect to MAPI/Exchange server. In this case due to these new facts http://us3.php.net/imap may be the answer as suggested by the other user.