I have to develop some reports from some calendars in the Public Folders section of our Exchange Server using Crystal Reports 9 (CR) and then moving the reports onto either the web, or a desktop application, or both.

My first step was to try to access the Exchange data store directly from Crystal Reports to create a representative report and have run into the folowing issues:

1. When using the CR Database Expert to connect the Calendar folder in Exchange, in the New Connection dialog, I tried both the "Exchange" option and the "Outlook" option. The "Exchange" option connects quickly but the available fields returned appear to be for a mail message folder, not a Calendar folder.(???) Using the "Outlook" options returns Calendar fields but something seems to be wrong since any attempt to access the data store is incredibly slow, to the point it is unusable. Even creating parameter fields then trying to access the data store fields and relate them to parameter fields for filtering in the Record Selection Expert is incredibly slow for any/every operation. Plus, when I created a sample report and tried to run it, after waiting several minutes for it to "think" about it, it popped up the familiar OL security dialog "Blah-blah is attempting to access blah-blah, do you want to allow this...". What am I doing wrong here to access the Exchange data store?

2. Assuming I am able eventually to actually query the Exchange data store, can logging in to the Exchange server be accomplished programmatically for a web application or desktop application and how would this be done?

Any information or location of resources on the web on these issues will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill