Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Mar 01, 2019

Common Contacts List

Hi Guys, With Outlook is it possible to share selected individual contacts into a team pool which showed up in everyone else’s contact list as a common contact. We would then like to be abl...

office 365

VasilMichev

MVP

Mar 01, 2019

Storing them in the GAL is one option, however that can add clutter and generally requires admin permissions, plus you cannot manage those directly from Outlook, thus it will be a pain for the end users. So the usual suggestion is to use something like a PF Contacts folder: https://www.quadrotech-it.com/blog/create-a-company-shared-contacts-folder-in-office-365/

You can achieve similar results with a Contacts folder stored in a shared mailbox, though it's a bit more "manual" to add those in Outlook.

ChrisHoardMVP

MVP

Mar 01, 2019

Sticking to my guns on this one - external contacts is a far better experience across all devices than a PF or a contacts folder in a shared mailbox. Definitely true about it being admin led though it loses value if you want users to self manage it.

Best, Chris

Damien Conlon
Copper Contributor
Mar 01, 2019
Hi Guys,

Thanks for the replies.

A key requirement of this was that it could be self-managed, as we were trying to get away from the job being the responsibility of one person who had no sooner collated the static list then the information would start to decay as contact information slowly changed. We wanted a way that each team member could contribute their own contacts and amend or delete them as necessary keeping everything fresh and in real-time.

It sounds like the public folder method might be the way to go. I'll follow the method on the link provided and run a little experiment and see how it works.

Really appreciate the input, you guys are a valuable resource!

Many thanks, Damien