thechild / pyexchange

Open source project to connect to exchange via Python

PyExchange

PyExchange is a library for Microsoft Exchange.

It's incomplete at the moment - it only handles calendar events. We've open sourced it because we found it useful and hope others will, too.

If you're interested, please see the CONTRIBUTING notes in the repo for hints on where to get started.

Documentation

Go to https://pyexchange.readthedocs.org for the most recent, up-to-date version of documentation.

Installation

PyExchange supports Python 2.6 and 2.7. Our code is compatible with 3.3+, but see the notes below on getting it working. Non CPython implementations may work but are not tested.

We support Exchange Server version 2010. Others will likely work but are not tested.

To install, use pip:

pip install pyexchange

PyExchange requires lxml for XML handling. This will be installed by pip on most systems. If you run into problems, please see lxml's installation instructions.

To install from source, download the source code, then run:

python setup.py install

Python 3

We use the library python-ntlm for authentication. As of July 2013, they have an experimental Python 3 port but it's not in PyPI for easy download.

To the best of our knowledge, PyExchange works with this port and is Python 3.3 compatible. But since this isn't easily testable, we can't officially support Python 3 at the moment.

Help in this area would be appreciated.

About

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess, who wanted to connect her web application to the royal Microsoft Exchange server.

The princess first tried all manner of SOAP libraries, but found them broken, or slow, or not unicode compliant, or plain just didn't work with Exchange.

"This totally bites," said the princess. "I need like four commands and I don't want to make my own SOAP library."

She then discovered Microsoft had excellent documentation on its Exchange services with full XML samples.

"Bitchin," said the princess, who had watched too many 80s movies recently. "I'll just write XML instead."

So she did, and it worked, and there was much feasting and celebration, followed by a royal battle with accounting over what constituted reasonable mead expenses.

And everybody lived happily ever after.

THE END