Unified Contact Store in EWS in Exchange 2013

The Unified Contact Store is a feature that provides a consistent contact experience across Office products and acts as an integration point for third-party applications to use the same contact store. It enables users and applications to store, manage, and access contact information in a single location. Contact information can be made available to any application that implements access to the Unified Contact Store, including Lync 2013, Exchange 2013, Outlook 2013, and Outlook Web App. Exchange Server 2013 is the store for Unified Contact Store data.

The Unified Contact Store expands on the idea of a contact. It solves the problem of multiple contacts with different display names that represent a single person. The Unified Contact Store enables the collection of contact data under a single entity, called a persona, that represents a set of linked contacts. Rather than working with contact data, the Unified Contact Store enables clients to work with personas.

Contact linking takes place in the Unified Contact Store. By drawing on contact information from different data stores, the Unified Contact Store provides client applications with an aggregated view of people. Outlook Web App provides a UI for linked contacts.

EWS in Exchange 2013 introduces new operations that access Unified Contact Store functionality. The following table lists the new operations.

Note
The Unified Contact Store operations are not implemented in the EWS Managed API.

The following are possible scenarios for which you can use the Unified Contact Store.

Provision Lync client applications with a default set of IM contact items

If you are an enterprise application deployment engineer, you might prefer to standardize provisioning across all users in an organization. The Unified Contact Store operations provide a straightforward web service interface for adding initial IM contacts and groups to a user's default Lync client. You can add a process for provisioning users' accounts to contain default contacts, such as teammates and other important partners. By using Exchange Impersonation, an administrator, or even an automated service application, can add an initial set of contacts and groups to each user's Unified Contact Store.

Manage IM contact and group lists

IM contact and groups lists can become outdated due to changes in an organization. You can use the Unified Contact Store operations to automatically clean up contact and group lists. The operations give access to contact information that can be compared to either directory resources or other data stores to determine whether the contacts are still valid. For example, a user might start in a position where they work closely with the legal department. The user sets up groups and contact lists accordingly. Then that user moves to a position in sales that does not require communication with legal contacts. You can create an automated process that identifies and removes the outdated contacts and groups.

Manage custom Lync client access to IM contacts and IM groups

You can use the Lync client APIs to develop custom Lync client applications. You can use the Unified Contact Store EWS operations to set up and only expose the IM groups and contacts that are applicable for a user. More importantly, it might be useful to restrict user management of the Lync client list.

IM clients and servers use the Exchange store to store contact lists. You can use the EWS operations provided in Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2010 to store contacts. The new Unified Contact Store operations simplify the business logic and the number of calls required to implement a Unified Contact Store in Exchange. All IM contacts are stored in a read-only folder called QuickContacts. You can use the AddNewImContactToGroup and AddImContactToGroup operations to add contacts to this group.

The Unified Contact Store also maintains group information to group IM contacts. This simplifies how associated contacts are grouped in the form of personas and are then surfaced from the Exchange store.

The Unified Contact Store operations return aggregated contact information in the form of a persona. For more information about personas, see Personas in EWS in Exchange 2013.

• New features in EWS in Exchange 2013

• EWS client design overview for Exchange 2013

• Personas in EWS in Exchange 2013

• AddImGroup operation

• AddNewImContactToGroup operation

• SetImGroup operation

• RemoveImGroup operation

• GetImItemList operation