Read out of office from exchange server for other users C#

Question

I am trying to read the Out Of Office status and message from other users in the organization from my c# program. We are running Exchange 2013 on premises.

This app is running as an Active Directory account (with it's own exchange mailbox), and I cannot use impersonation.

I have spent some time trying out the solutions to similar questions such as:

• Retrieve out of office Status using EWS 2.0 This one uses impersonation
• Read out of office from exchange server for other users I'm not using the Outlook Object Model
• How to get Out of Office for another mailbox again no impersonation for me
• http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2011/11/using-mailtips-in-ews-to-get-oof-out-of.html I don't have reference to ExchangeServiceBinding, even though I'm using Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data;
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/devmsg/archive/2014/06/03/ews-how-to-retrieve-the-oof-out-of-facility-settings-message-using-ews-for-an-exchange-user.aspx This one takes as a paramater, urlname and I'm not sure where that url is coming from. This one seems the most promising though, any ideas where that comes from?

I'm trying to get something like:

public void checkOOF(string userEmail){
bool isOOF = checkstuff(userEmail);
string message;
if(isOOF)
   message = getOOFMessage(userEmail);
}

Please help me understand, thank you.

Answer 1

This is what I ended up using and it works.

public static string getOOM(string emailToCheck) //needs to be full email of user.
{
            string EWSurl = String.Format("https://{0}/EWS/Exchange.asmx", ExchangePath);
            WebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(EWSurl);
            HttpWebRequest httpwebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)webRequest;
            httpwebRequest.Method = "POST";
            httpwebRequest.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
            httpwebRequest.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version11;
            httpwebRequest.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("user", "password", "domain");//service Account
            httpwebRequest.Timeout = 60000;
            Stream requestStream = httpwebRequest.GetRequestStream();
            StreamWriter streamWriter = new StreamWriter(requestStream, Encoding.ASCII);

            StringBuilder getMailTipsSoapRequest = new StringBuilder("<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\"");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append(" xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" ");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("xmlns:soap=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" ");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("xmlns:t=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types\"><soap:Header>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append(" <t:RequestServerVersion Version=\"Exchange2010\"/></soap:Header><soap:Body>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<GetMailTips xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/messages\">");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<SendingAs>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<t:EmailAddress>accessingemail@domain.com</t:EmailAddress>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<t:RoutingType>SMTP</t:RoutingType></SendingAs>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<Recipients><t:Mailbox>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<t:EmailAddress>" + emailToCheck + "</t:EmailAddress>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("<t:RoutingType>SMTP</t:RoutingType></t:Mailbox></Recipients>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append(" <MailTipsRequested>OutOfOfficeMessage</MailTipsRequested></GetMailTips>");
            getMailTipsSoapRequest.Append("</soap:Body></soap:Envelope>");

            streamWriter.Write(getMailTipsSoapRequest.ToString());
            streamWriter.Close();
            HttpWebResponse webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)httpwebRequest.GetResponse();

            StreamReader streamreader = new StreamReader(webResponse.GetResponseStream());
            string response = streamreader.ReadToEnd();
            if (response.Contains("<t:Message/>"))
                return null;
            int messageIndex = response.IndexOf("<t:Message>");
            response = response.Substring(messageIndex, response.IndexOf("</t:Message>") - messageIndex);
            return response;
}

Answer 2

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/devmsg/archive/2014/06/03/ews-how-to-retrieve-the-oof-out-of-facility-settings-message-using-ews-for-an-exchange-user.aspx This one takes as a paramater, urlname and I'm not sure where that url is coming from. This one seems the most promising though, any ideas where that comes from?

urlname is just the EWS URL if you are using the Managed API than just use the value from service.url.

http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2011/11/using-mailtips-in-ews-to-get-oof-out-of.html I don't have reference to ExchangeServiceBinding, even though I'm using Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data;

This is proxy code generated from the Exchange Web Service WSDL file see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dd877040(v=exchg.140).aspx (Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data) is the Managed API.

Answer 3

Solution worked great for me as supplied by Aaron. However returning the substring gave me issues since ours was an html string rather than plain text and it didn't parse correctly. So i replaced the StreamReader down portion with the following. This still returns as a string but correctly parses as the html it was returned as.

        XDocument doc;
        using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
        {
            doc = XDocument.Load(responseStream);
        }
        return doc.Root.Descendants().Where(d => d.Name.LocalName == "Message").Select(d => d.Value).FirstOrDefault();