Sharing Contacts in Outlook

Posted: May 2007

Sharing Contacts in Outlook

One of the questions we get asked all the time is how to share contacts in Microsoft Outlook.

If you have a small office, and you want to have one address book for all your contacts (often called a "global" address book) then what options do you have?

Well- the Microsoft solution is to use a full email server system - this is called Exchange. However, this is an expensive solution and whilst being powerful, and fully featured (it does an awful lot more than just contact sharing), is often an overkill to simply share contacts.

The good news for businesses that there are other options - if you have a Small Business Server 2003, then Exchange 2003 is built-in and you will just need to configure it.

However, if you don't have a server at all - or don't want to invest in one then you can still share contacts. There are a number of 3rd party applications which allow you to share the contacts on a Peer-to-Peer basis (i.e. without a dedicated server). One particular system we installed for a client was "OLFolders", this cost them £150 for a 3 person network, and they can now share contacts to their hearts content - another added bonus was the fact that they also have a shared calendar, which enables them to easily see things like holidays, company events and jobs on one central calendar which they can all access.

If you are looking to improve business efficiency with IT - why not give us a ring?

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