MS Outlook Contact Database Synchronization

Business Problem: Our client, a prime contractor, was in the process of developing a custom business process management application for their client, a printer servicing the graphic arts market in Hollywood, CA. This application was to be used to manage the sales process (contact management, contract bids, etc.), customer relationship management, and the management and tracking of each project from beginning to end.

One requirement was that the contact information stored in the application be synchronized with the contact information stored in each employee's copy of MS Outlook. Changes and additions in Outlook needed to be propagated to the custom application and vice versa. Celtic Wolf, Inc. was engaged by the prime to provide a solution for this requirement.

Solution: Using the API that Microsoft makes available for Outlook, we wrote an application (ContactsToFM) that would:

• Create new Outlook Contacts as appropriate to match contacts in the custom application.
• Create new contacts in the custom application as appropriate to match Outlook Contacts.
• Using the "modified date" field found in both Outlook and the custom application, propagate changes between corresponding records when appropriate.

Additional requirements were:

1. ContactsToFM should look like part of the main application
2. Run-time configuration information such as file locations and field mappings would not change from run to run
3. The mapping of fields should be configurable to allow for the possibility of changes in the main application
4. The application would be installed and maintained by the prime contractor's staff who would need some way of easily creating and modifying the configuration for an installation

To address requirement #1, we designed ContactToFM's run-time interface to consist solely of a status window that displayed the synchronization's progress. #2 and 4 were accomplished by specifying all run-time options via a configuration file and developing a separate configuration tool for use by the prime's personnel. We satisfied #3 by having fields mappings specified in the configuration file and by designing ContactsToFm to dynamically map fields based on that configuration information.

Click here for technical details
Back to list of projects