No contacts shown when Exchange only allows searching and not listing

[onitake]

I'm not sure if this is a user/client issue, but it looks like akonadi-ews doesn't support server-side contact searching.

As far as I can tell, our Exchange server is configured to not allow listing contacts, so I don't see any contacts from the global address book. In Outlook or Evolution, I can still search for contacts, which will make them show up.

Do I need to configure anything to make global Exchange contacts work in Akonadi, or is this feature still missing?

[KrissN]

Currently Akonadi EWS has initial support for the personal address book. The Global Address Book (GAL) is a different story.

Most Exchange servers don't allow listing GAL entries (only the newest ones bring some additional API to do this). It is only possible to search the GAL.

On the Akonadi side you can search the address book locally or remotely. By default only a local search is performed (i.e. Akonadi will only search what it has in the database and not contact the resource). This way even if GAL online search was implemented it would still not work.

There is another possibility to solve this by using the offline GAL download feature, which is there to allow Outlook to cache the GAL for offline use. This would however introduce a lot of overhead for large organisations (imagine a locally-cached GAL for an organisation with over 300k users).

Akonadi does support online search for contacts using LDAP, but this is done bypassing the regular resource API. In any case some work will need to be done on Akonadi to get this fully working.

[onitake]

Thanks for the clarifications, this confirms what I suspected.
I'm guessing this is the API that needs to be used for GAL searching? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa563518%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx

As LDAP contact searching is already implemented, is there a way to piggyback on it, maybe?
If the mentioned SOAP function is implemented, how would I have to configure akonadi to perform online searches? Or can this be controlled by the agent?

[KrissN]

Yes, this is the right API.

I haven't had a deep enough look into that part of Akonadi yet. One way would be to allow an opt-in for a remote search per resource instead of forcing a local search as it is done today. I have done some experiments on that, but there are some more grey areas there. In any case without hacking the server and possibly KMail it is not possible to do online searches with resources.

I guess it's a topic to be raised with Akonadi folks to come to a decision on how to do this right so that everybody is happy.