Adapter architecture

The adapter for Microsoft Exchange Server enables the exchange of business objects between your integration broker and Exchange Server.

Exchange Server is a powerful electronic messaging back end that supports a variety of email protocols. It can host calendars, contact lists, and many other types of files for individual users and for entire organizations through the use of public and private folders. The adapter for Exchange permits the exchange of data between Exchange Server and other applications.

Figure 1 illustrates the general architecture of the connector.

Figure 1. Exchange Server connector architecture

General architecture block diagram showing the application-specific component within the Connector FrameWork communicating with both the Exchange Server machine and the integration broker.

The application-specific component of the Exchange Server connector contains the event notification functionality and a single business object handler that can understand all six types of supported Exchange business entities: AppointmentItems, ContactItems, MailItems, TaskItems, Recipients, and RecurrencePatterns.

The application-specific component performs the following tasks:

Event Listener

The adapter for Exchange contains an additional component called Event Listener. Unlike the connector itself, the Event Listener component is installed on the same machine as Exchange Server; it listens for all subscribed events (for example, the creation, modification, or deletion of an item) in Exchange Server and then logs them to the Event Store, where the connector can pick them up.

This component must be installed as a COM+ event sink application. An event sink is an application that is launched by a defined trigger (in this case, the arrival of a subscribed event).

You must subscribe to changes by creating an event registration file in each folder for which events are going to be generated. The event registration file is a hidden file that is bound to the event sink. When the Microsoft Information Store Service starts up, it searches for these hidden files and adds them to its list of folders to monitor. Whenever an item in a monitored folder is saved or deleted, the Information Store Service notifies the event sink that is associated with the event registration.

Event Listener performs the following tasks each time it receives a subscribed event:

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