Date: 07/13/07 (PHP Community)    Keywords: php, database, web

Hi everyone!

At my place of employment, we have a web form that will send an e-mail to our IT helpdesk person so they know that a work order has been placed. Currently, there is no reliable automatic way to send a confirmation e-mail saying the work request has been received. Despite the fact that we specifically ask the person requesting the work to enter their e-mail address, they usually don't, or just put their computer username because they don't know the difference (Asking people to read instructions? Shocking!)

I had this idea today that perhaps our Exchange server could be queried to pull the names/usernames of all the people in our company so they could choose their name from a list, rather than relying on them to actually read the instructions and enter their e-mail.

Another option would be to just dump everyone's name and e-mail addresses into a small database and query that. Unfortunately, this adds extra steps for our helpdesk people to follow when creating new users, and requires them to have access to our web server, which we'd rather not give.

This idea literally came to me like 5 minutes ago, so I'm coming to you, oh Great and Wonderful LJ Community, to ask if this sort of thing is doable, and if it is, what kinds of stuff would I need to use with PHP to get it to work?

I should note that our Exchange server is hosted externally, as I'm sure that sort of information makes a difference.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/php/576359.html