How pull GAL of a different mailbox (Exchange) in Outlook or develop an outlook Add-in to do that

Question

The company I work for is a contractors for a large organisation with thousands and thousands of users. This organisation have setup some mailboxes for us to access their GAL (Global Address Book).

Although we need access to this GAL but at the same time we do not want our users to start using their mailboxes.

So I am trying to find a way to setup outlook 2013 in such a way that users can search this GAL but are not able to send or receive email from this mailbox.

Note: we only have email addresses and passwords no access to their Exchange server.

One of the idea I had was to develop an outlook add-in which searches this GAL and allow the user to add the email address into the To or CC box of the message being composed but I have no idea where to start or even if it’s possible without access to Exchange server.

I would highly appreciate if some one can steer me to the right direction.

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of to prevent users from being able to send or receive mail would be to set their send receive limit to like 1KB:

Get-Mailbox user | Set-Mailbox -ProhibitSendReceiveQuota 1KB