There’s no service like Web service

One of the cool things about Exchange 2007 is the new Web service interface into the store. In theory, having mailboxes and contents exposed via Web services makes it a lot easier for developers and casual dabblers to use Web service-aware tools to interact with Exchange content.

Two weeks ago, I wanted to perform a quick experiment by seeing if I could use Exchange Web Services (EWS) in a SharePoint page to make an always up-to-date extension list for our office. Now, I know this information is stored in Active Directory as attributes on the User objects, but I didn’t see a quick, easy way to configure a SharePoint web part to perform an LDAP or AD query. Instead, I opened up SharePoint Designer and pointed it toward our EWS instance, and what I found surprised me.

Does anyone out there in reader land have any clue why SharePoint Designer insists that an EWS instance isn’t “a valid description of an XML Web service”?

https://exchange.server.fqdn/ews/Services.wsdl

I can browse to it manually, enter my credentials, and get a bunch of XML that sure looks like valid WSDL — but SharePoint Designer’s integrated WSDL parser can’t seem to make heads or tails of it. I could easily consume other types of Web services, and looking at their WSDL, it looks like it’s making use of a lot fewer XML namespaces; their XML structure seems quite a bit simpler than Exchange is generating.

I tried contacting the official SharePoint team blog and was basically told, “Go away, kid. Call support.” I’ve not had a lot of spare time recently to pursue this, but I’m pursuing some other avenues to see if I can’t get to the bottom of this. Stay tuned!