Introduction to Contacts
Topic Last Modified: 2006-06-30
As business practices become increasingly complex, the ability to reach many people quickly becomes more critical. Contact applications are designed to help you efficiently store and access contact information.
Contact objects are derived from the Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) Person object and are used to store basic information about a person, such as their name, address, and phone number. Contact objects are similar to User objects, but are not security principals, so they cannot be used to log on to, or to access resources from, the network.
Contact objects can be created and saved to the Active Directory® directory service, the Exchange store, or both. Contact objects that reside in Active Directory can also be mail-enabled. If you create a mail-enabled contact to represent a consultant, people can e-mail this consultant just as they would another employee, by using an alias.
Some of the benefits of using contacts with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 are as follows:
- The CDO Person object enables faster development by creating and managing contact information stored in the Exchange store and Active Directory.
- The CDO Person object enables easy conversion of contact information into the Internet industry vCard format.
- A predefined Exchange store schema.
- The ability to manipulate contact information through the CDO Person object and Microsoft Outlook®.