May 15 2009
VisendoSMTPExtender Management Web Service
Background:
For work, I’m using a Windows 2008 Server virtual machine for doing all my SharePoint and .Net development on. As it has got all of the cool stuff I’m working on, it is also the machine that I use to demo what I can do to clients. Recently I’ve had a bit of a serge in the number of clients wanting to see Nintex Workflow 2007 (NFW2007) for SharePoint.
One of the cool features of NWF2007 is the whole Lazy Approval system, whereby users don’t have to go into SharePoint to approve to decline requests, they can just reply to the notification email with “approved”, “declined”, “ok”, “yes”, “no” or any other recognised word as the first line of the email. In or to demonstrate this I need to setup and email system on my local machine. The SMTP (sending) side of things is easy as it is built in to Windows 2008. However, POP3 is a bit of a problem. Previous version of IIS had a simple POP3 service but that has been dropped in IIS7. The Microsoft way would be to install Exchange Server but that is a little too heavyweight for what I am trying to acheive. Luckily a company called Visendo provides a free solution to plug the gap. So now I can demo Nintex notification features.
Another feature I also wanted to demonstrate was setting up Active Directory accounts and then using those new accounts. Nintex has got actions that allow you to interact with Active Directory but to then do anything usefull with the account required modifying xml config files and restarting the Visendo service. But Nintex can call web services, so I’ve created a web service that has an AddAccount and DeleteAccount methods to update the Visendo configuration and restart the service.
Download:
I’ve made the source code for this web service freely available should anyone else want to have this sort of functionality: VisendoSMTPService. The code is written against .Net 3.5 and is provided “as is” with no sort of warranty and is most definitely NOT recommended for live systems. The code is released under a BSD License.
Last time I needed a simple mail server on Windows, I used hMailServer: http://www.hmailserver.com/ . I actually did this even on Windows 2003 because it made it easy to test everywhere, including dev machines and servers that didn’t use IIS.
That does look like a very handy mail server that I may come back to in the future but I’m not sure it would have been as easy to get up and running.
The solution I went for require zero configuration for SMTP and just installing the Visendo software and changing a couple of settings in an XML file.
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