Guidelines for properly displaying activities

Outlook Social Connector (OSC) providers can set the getActivities and dynamicActivitiesLookupEx elements to have the OSC store activity items in memory. This topic describes the OSC provider extensibility APIs that the OSC calls to get or refresh activities and activity owner details, if the OSC provider supports synchronizing activity feeds from the social network. The topic also lists a few child elements of the activityFeed element that the OSC provider should set for the OSC to display activities properly in the Office Contact Card or Outlook People Pane.

  • The OSC calls the ISocialSession2::GetActivitiesEx method to get and store activities in the News Feed folder for the logged-on user. The OSC provider must implement GetActivitiesEx to return an activities XML string that complies with the OSC provider XML schema definition of the activityFeed element.

  • The OSC provider must set the ownerID element, which is a child element of the activityDetails element. ownerID is an opaque string that identifies the owner of the activity on the social network.

  • The OSC provider should set the nameHint and emailAddress elements in the publisherVariable node of the templateVariables element.

    Note that per the OSC provider XML schema, the nameHint element is an optional element. The OSC uses it to match the display name of the user selected in the Contact Card or People Pane. Similarly, the emailAddress element is an optional element in the XML schema. The OSC uses it to match the SMTP address of the user selected in the Contact Card or People Pane.

    If only the ownerID element is specified, but one or both of nameHint and emailAddress are not specified, the OSC calls the ISocialSession2::GetPeopleDetails method and then the ISocialPerson::GetDetails method to get more information about the person identified by the ownerID. When the OSC calls ISocialPerson::GetDetails, the provider must return person XML that specifies the fullName and emailAddress elements.

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