Creating a Contacts List for Your Company

By Drew Nicholson, dnicholson@OutlookExchange.com

Creating A Contacts List for Your Company

Every company has one. They're always getting out of hand. They're usually a mess. They're hard to organize. No, we're not talking about the fax machine. What every company has is a list of contacts that defies collation.

Now, if you wanted to, you could simply create a list of these contacts in a contact folder in Outlook and email them to your users. But A, your list is probably several hundred contacts long, which isn't very efficiently distributed this way, and 2, the instant you finish emailing that list is the instant you start to get variences from person to person.

The best way to keep this list standardized company wide, organized the way you want, and easy to manage is through a public folder. This allows it to be backed up with the rest of the Pub.edb, you can make it be a searchable address book, and it's all in one place.

Simply go into your public folder tree and create a new folder, choosing CONTACTS as the type. (You'll actually do this through Outlook.) Give the proper people read access and the proper people read/write access. (Only allow a very few select group of people change and delete access.)

Now comes the manual labor intensive part. Every Outlook user will have to go to that public folder, right-click on it, select properties, go to the ADDRESS BOOK tab, and check the "Use as Address Book" box. In addition, every user will have to add it to their Tools/Service/Addressing/Check Names info box.

Because Exchange 5.5 does much of the public folder management through Outlook, there's no good way around this. Depending on the size of your company, this could be one of the most time-consuming tasks you perform. But your users will thank you for it.

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