From Public Folders to SharePoint: A Modern Approach to Shared Contact Management

Thanks for sharing this article — the overall direction (moving from Public Folders to SharePoint for shared contacts) makes a lot of sense 👍

That said, I’d like to point out a practical issue many readers will run into today: in a modern SharePoint Online tenant, the “Contacts” list template is no longer available (or not visible) when creating a new list.

When selecting New > List, most tenants only see templates like Issue Tracker, Event Itinerary, Asset Manager, etc. — but no Contacts template (see attached screenshot).

This can be confusing, because the blog suggests “Choose the Contacts template”, which isn’t possible in many up-to-date tenants. In practice, the recommended approach seems to be:

• Create a blank custom list / Microsoft List
• Add contact columns manually (Name, Email, Phone, Company, etc.)

It might be helpful to clarify this in the article so readers don’t think they’re missing something in their tenant or configuration.

Thanks for the guidance overall — the concept is solid, but the UI steps appear to reference a legacy or no-longer-exposed template.