Third party application can list contacts from shared contacts folder, but not retrieve

Question

I am working with a third party developer on a problem occurring in their application.<o:p></o:p>
The software displays the contact list and retrieves a fax number from Outlook. I wish to
return a number from an Outlook Shared Contacts Folder.
This works well under Windows 7 with Outlook 2013 in cached mode..<o:p></o:p>
Running the same software in a terminal services window on a Remote Desktop Server running
Server 2008 R2 with Outlook in Online mode an error is produced when trying to
do the same. The contact list is shown, but when the code tries to retrieve the
displayed record there is the following error:<o:p></o:p>
x664bc8bcf689f252.x36f18e7b3c08fff5()
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80040201): The operation failed.
at Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.AddressEntry.GetContact()
at Zetadocs.Outlook.OM.x664bc8bcf689f252.x36f18e7b3c08fff5()<o:p></o:p>
If I open Outlook myself first, browse to People and click on the Shared Contacts Folder,
then run the application, there is no error and everything works fine. It is as
if starting Outlook from code is not loading all contact folder information.<o:p></o:p>
Have you any suggestions on what may be causing this to happen and if I can do anything to cure this?<o:p></o:p>

Answer 1

Sorry to be away from this for so long.
It looks like Outlook is not initializing shared folders when it starts.
I confirmed this using the following code for the Outlook startup event:
Private Sub Application_Startup()
    Dim olApp As Outlook.Application
    Dim nspNameSpace As Outlook.NameSpace
    Dim objTempFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
    Set olApp = ThisOutlookSession.Application
    Set nspNameSpace = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    For Each objTempFolder In nspNameSpace.Folders
    Next objTempFolder
End Sub
With this in place I do not need to go to People and click the shared folder, and the third party app has no problems retrieving.
The third party app starts Outlook itself if it is not already running. In this scenario no events fire.
So the question is: Is there a means of executing this code when the third party app starts Outlook?