Hi Jochen,
There certainly are a number of new features in Exchange Web Services. The feature I'm most excited about is our Exchange Web Services Managed API. It is a fantastic managed code (C#/VB/etc) wrapper around our Exchange Web Services protocol. It makes it very easy to develop new applications against Exchange. We got a great post and whitepaper, as well as preliminary documentation. Take a look at the
Exchange Developer Center for more details.
Let me give you an idea of what it looks like to use this new API to bind to the contacts folder and print out the number of items that it contains.
ExchangeService testService = new ExchangeService();
testService.AutodiscoverUrl(jasonhen@exchange.microsoft.com);
Folder contacts = Folder.Bind(testService, WellKnownFolderName.Contacts);
Console.WriteLine(contacts.TotalCount);
In addition to the Managed API we've also enabled access to Folder Associated Items, also known as Associated or Hidden items and surfaced a UserConfiguration object which enables you to store application specific data in a users mailbox. We've added a SOAP AutoDiscover interface which will enable you to look up the configuration information for many users with only a single call to AutoDiscover. We've also added support for creating and modifying Contact Groups, also known as Personal Distribution Lists. This is the first Exchange API ever to enable first class handling of Contact Groups.
Some administrative features we've added include RBAC-based Impersonation and service throttling so that administrators can limit the amount of resources that an EWS application can use. Whew- that's a lot of features and I'm sure I'm missing something!
EWS does not expose user creation or mailbox management functionality, you would use PowerShell for that functionality. Now with Remote Powershell you no longer need to have the Exchange Admin tools installed to remotely administer your machines, and the programmatic interface for calling Powershell has improved as well. So, I'd recommending taking a look at Powershell 2.0 and our new remotePowershell functionality if you need to do user creation/modification.
Jason Henderson
