Exchange Server 2013 MAPI profile Generator

By Vern Weitzman

What do telephone books have in common with Exchange server MAPI applications? For starters, there won't be any extensive investment in either of these technologies. They will both be relics of the past and no one will miss them.

Even though we are working diligently to support EWS in our contact management software, we occasionally have a requirement for a stand alone MAPI profile when connecting to Exchange. However, Exchange 2013 radically changed the requirements for building a profile. Since Microsoft recommends against installing Outlook, and using it to run MAPI background services, that means we can’t use Outlook to create a profile.

When you run the standalone MAPI/CDO component, the documented procedure to build an Exchange 2013 profile is not user friendly. You need to be proficient with MFCMAPI and very meticulous with a hex editor. After several attempts at this process, profanity is commonly expressed.

I had the pleasure of creating an Exchange 2013 Server profile for many server installations and it was obvious that we should never ask a customer to do this procedure. For my own sanity, I tasked one of our engineers to create an app to automate Exchange 2013 profile generation. You can download the itrezzo MAPI generator here. The download is just a zip file. Extract the contents into a subfolder and run iaProfGen.EXE.

Note: If you are setting up a MAPI application to run as a Windows Service, be sure to logon as the service account since the MAPI profile has to be accessible in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Run iaProfGen ( double click or open the application ) and this window will appear.

1. Select Exchange 2013 as shown above 
2. Be certain that the identity is the owner of the service account mailbox 
3. Name the profile 
4. Click the Discover button

1. Note that the unique server identifier for the Exchange Server is automatically filled in 
2. If your environment supports AutoDiscover, the RPC proxy server or CAS will be filled in. If it is empty after AutoDiscover, you have to enter this manually. 
3. Hit the configure button to create the MAPI profile

Watch the log window to insure that the profile was created successfully.

Now hit the Test button to insure that the profile works.

All constructive feedback is welcome in the comments below and feel free to learn more about itrezzo contact management solutions.