使用C＃将Outlook联系人获取为CSV

Question

I am faced with a problem at work were we have a sales team which store their contacts in Outlook and dont always use the CRM, we need these contacts to help with out analytics of the sales.

Now to try and avoid forcing the sales team to use the CRM or manually export their contacts I am looking at a possible way to extract their contacts from outlook programmaticly and create a CSV file which can be emailed to the head office and then added to the database using a Perl script.

I have ideas on ways to do parts of this ie i could make the program run as a timed task to do it daily and store a small SQLLite DB file with the program to make sure that only new contacts are added to the CSVto be emailed each time.

The problem I currently have is I am finding it hard to find decent information on how to get to the contacts using C#. I have seen some info based on using Microsoft.Office.Interlop.Outlook namespace but not much more than that.

If anyone could point me to a location where someone has tried something similar so that I could see how it is done and then create my customized program.

Thank you in advance for any help

Answer 1

If you want to access the Outlook data (contacts for example) you have to add a COM reference to the Microsoft Outlook XX Object library.

Afterwards you can create an instance of the Outlook application object:

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application outlook;
outlook = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();   

You can get a collection of contacts in the following manner:

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder folder =
    outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
        .GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts);
IEnumerable<ContactItem> contacts = folder.Items.OfType<ContactItem>();

You can then query this collection using LINQ to Objects:

var query = from contact in contacts
            where contact.Email1Address != null
            select contact;

Stefan Cruysbergs created an OutlookProvider component which acts as a wrapper for the Outlook application object. You can use LINQ to query this provider and retrieve data such as the contacts.

He has a full explanation of it here:

http://www.scip.be/index.php?Page=ArticlesNET05&Lang=NL

You can download his component here:

http://www.scip.be/index.php?Page=DownloadNETOfficeItems&Lang=NL

Study his code. It should be enough to get you started.