We currently have the main GAL for the company directory. But we also want to have 2 different client address list that are viewable to the company. How do you recommend we set them up? The ideal situation would be that they would see these list in the drop down for address, then when they choose that list it would give all the client addresses there.
How should this be done? Any step by step info would be nice.
There are a number of ways you can do this. If this option doesn't work we can talk about the other ways to do something similar.
Option 1
If you want these contacts to show up in a GAL you will first need to get the information into Active Directory by creating Exchange contacts for each customer. You can add the address, phone number, etc into the contact.
Second, if you don't want the contacts to show up in the main GAL amongst the rest of your internal users you will most likely want to create another Address List for thes.
For the example described in this section, you create an Address Book to find all external contacts. To configure this Address Book view:
1.
Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.
2.
Expand the Recipients object, right-click the All Address Lists object, point to New, and then click Address List.
3.
Type a name that describes the list that you are creating, for example, type Department.
4.
Click Filter Rules.
5.
On the General tab, click the types of Exchange 2003 objects that are displayed in a particular Address Book view.
For example, make sure either the Users with external e-mail addresses check box is checked and that you uncheck the Groups check box, the Contacts check box, and the Public Folders check box to exclude these groups from the address list.
7.
Click the Advanced tab, click Field, and then click one of the following attributes that you want to use for your address book filter button:
•
Contact
For this example, click Contact, and then click Department.
8.
Under the Condition label, click one of the following settings depending on the information that you are trying to find:
Starts with
Ends with
Is(exactly)
Is not
Present
Not present
9.
If you click either Starts with, Ends with, Is(exactly) or Is not as your condition, type a value in the Value field.For example, click Is(exactly), and then type Headquarters to find all of the employees who work at headquarters.
10.
Click Add. NOTE: You can add further conditions, but remember that the logic is "AND". Therefore, all conditions must be true for a match to be displayed.
11.
After you have finished adding conditions, click Find Now.Matches to the conditions are displayed in the new list that is displayed at the bottom of the Find Users, Contacts, and Groups dialog box.
12.
Confirm that the list displays the correct users for the Address Book view, and then click OK.The new address list is displayed in Exchange System Manager.
More information about managing Address lists can be found here
The positive of this solution is that it shows up in the GAL. The bad thing about this is that the administrator or someone with access to Active Directory Users and Computers needs to manage the contacts if changes are made.
- Joel
With around 4k total contacts, I don't think that having them as AD contact would be worth it. Plus we need to keep 2 seperate list of contacts in addition to the internal users.
We need several users to be able to edit contacts which would I would not want to give AD access too.
Any other thoughts?
Option 1 is the way to get it to show up in the GAL, if it is going to be in the GAL it has to be in Active Directory.
Option 2 has to do with using other client software such as Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ACT!, Goldmine. I have seen these tools but haven't used them extensively but they will assist in creating a shared contacts pool to pull from.
Option 3 is creating a contacts folder in a public folder that all users know to reference. You could add a link to it on the users Outlook drawer.