Oct 23 2019
04:08 AM
- last edited on
Feb 01 2023
12:46 PM
by
TechCommunityAP
Oct 23 2019
04:08 AM
- last edited on
Feb 01 2023
12:46 PM
by
TechCommunityAP
In our organisation we use Outlook (Office 365) to manage a large number of contacts, and we use contact lists (or "contact groups" in the Outlook app) to categorize those contacts.
It's quite common for individual contacts to be added to multiple contact lists, for example freelancers or partners that are part of multiple projects. Unfortunately, updating contacts in one place, whether that's in a contact list or the address book, does not automatically update them in other places like the other contact lists they're part of. So when someone changes their e-mail address, we have to manually go through all the contact lists to update their information. We have thousands of contacts, updates come in frequently, and there's no way to search contact lists for a particular name or e-mail address, so this has become quite a nuisance.
This is explicitly stated when you add or edit a contact list: "The email addresses in a contact list are not connected to your saved contacts." So this appears to be by design (or necessity).
Are we doing this wrong, and is there perhaps another way to achieve this in Outlook? If not, are there any third-party tools or add-ins we can use? Or do we need to look at other products to manage our contacts?
Oct 23 2019 08:47 AM
If you want to "share" those contacts between multiple users/departments in your organizations, either create them directly in the GAL, or use a shared mailbox or similar. In other words, one central store, which all other users can access as needed, thus eliminating the need to update addresses multiple times. Even a SharePoint list should do (although you cannot sync it to mobiles).
Few years back Microsoft introduced the Outlook Customer Manager for such scenarios, but it has been pretty much gone into oblivion since then. Other options would be to use some CRM solution, meaning spend some $$$.
Oct 23 2019 11:49 AM
Oct 24 2019 12:03 AM
Outlook simply regards those as "personal", thus no sync mechanism. Evaluate the options I listed above, they are intended for "sharing" contacts.