Managing connections to the Exchange server

To communicate with an Exchange server, establish a connection with the server. The connection can use the HTTP protocol or the HTTPS protocol. By default, ColdFusion connects to the mailbox that belongs to the login user name, but you can also connect to any mailbox whose owner has delegated access rights to the login user name. You can also access the server by using a proxy host.

Note: To establish any connection, the Exchange server must grant the login user Outlook web access. For information on how to enable this access, see Enabling Outlook web access.

Connections to the server can be persistent or transient:

  • A persistent connection lasts until you explicitly close it. Persistent connections let you use a single connection for multiple tasks, which saves the processing overhead of opening and closing a separate connection for each interaction with the Exchange server.

  • A transient connection lasts for the duration of the tag that interacts with the Exchange server. Transient connections are a useful technique on ColdFusion pages where you only have to access the Exchange server for a single tag; for example, where you only get a set of contacts.