KDE, Kontact, MS Exchange

Here are some more tips on using KDE Kontact with MS Exchange server:

First of all, when using Kontact with Exchange webdav (covers Calendar, Contacts, …) you need to be logged in into Exchange web-mail with konqueror, because Exchange gives only NTLM authentication for webdav. This is a bit uncomfortable but still… For instance I start konqueror, login to Exchange webmail, then minimize the konqueror, move is in some far corner and use Kontact.

Here comes one more problem – authentication times out in a while (possibly 15 minutes) and you have to go back to konqueror to relogin. I was tired of this and finally I have found an auto-reload plugin which does the job. So after I login to Exchange webmail, in Konqueror main menu go to \”Settings->Configure Extensions\”, Select \”Tools\” tab in the popup and enable the \”Auto Refresh Plugin\”. Then in Konqueror \”Tools\” menu, at the bottom, select \”Auto Refresh\” with the reasonable time interval.

I know this is kinda long and complicated way, but unfortunately I can not see any other better way of using Kontact with Exchange. Hopefully KDE team will make better integration some time later.

Another tip is how to use \”Common Contacts\” from Exchange in Kontact in addition to personal Exchange Contacts. The same way as you set up personal contacts, while adding a resource to contacts module of Kontact, give this webdav address: webdav[s]:///public/Common Contacts/

The only thing is in my case it makes Kontact a bit slower since this address contains around 10000 contacts in a row and parsing them is not so easy task :)