How to: Share Contact Information Including the Business Card

You can use the ForwardAsVcard and ForwardAsBusinessCard method of the ContactItem object to create a new MailItem object that contains the contact information from the specified ContactItem attached as a vCard (.vcf) file, or you can use the AddBusinessCard method of the MailItem object to attach the contact information for a specified ContactItem as a vCard file. If you use the ForwardAsBusinessCard or AddBusinessCard methods, an image of the business card is also appended to the body of the mail item if the BodyFormat property of the MailItem object is set to olFormatHTML.

The following code sample in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a function, ForwardContactItem, that accepts a ContactItem object as a parameter and forwards the ContactItem object as an attachment to a new mail item. ForwardContactItem first checks if the object is a valid object. If the object is valid, ForwardContactItem calls the ForwardAsBusinessCard method of the ContactItem object to create a new MailItem object that has the contact information attached as a vCard. ForwardContactItem then displays and returns the MailItem object.

Private Function ForwardContactItem(objContactItem As Outlook.ContactItem) As Outlook.MailItem 
 
 Dim objMailItem As MailItem 
 
 On Error GoTo ErrRoutine 
 
 If objContactItem Is Nothing Then 
 ForwardContactItem = Nothing 
 Else 
 ' Forward the contact item, including a business card 
 ' image, and display the new MailItem object. 
 Set objMailItem = objContactItem.ForwardAsBusinessCard 
 objMailItem.Display 
 ForwardContactItem = objMailItem 
 End If 
 
EndRoutine: 
 Exit Function 
 
ErrRoutine: 
 MsgBox Err.Number & " - " & Err.Description, _ 
 vbOKOnly Or vbCritical, _ 
 "ForwardContactItem" 
 GoTo EndRoutine 
End Function