Hi,

We have a pretty large amount of contacts (about 22000). What would be the best place to store these contacts in a centralized place of Exchange, knowing that:

- they should be all visible and searchable from the Outlook address book
- contacts don't necessarily have an email address

The 2 solutions I see for the moment are:

- public folders, but it doesn't seem possible to make them visible by the address book (tested with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2013). Also I've read they could be deprecated in future version of Exchange.
- Exchange mail-contacts, but they need to have an email address.

Thank you for your help,

Alexandre

Contacts aren't stored n Exchange, they're stored in Active Directory.

Hi Alexandre,

As you said, the mail-contacts or mail-user need external email address in Exchange server. We can consider Public Folder for sharing public contacts to all client users.

If you are using Public Folder contact (default folder permission set to Author), the client user can do the following settings in Outlook 2010 and later version to manually add the Public Contacts to address book:

1. In Outlook, open Public Folder.

2. Right-click Public Contact folder, select Properties.

3. In Outlook Address Book tab, check Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book.

4. Click OK to save the setting.

Then the Public Contact folder should be added in the Address Book.

Regards,

Hi Winnie,

Thanks for your answer.

I can't see the Address Book tab in my public contact folder properties, did I miss something?

I'm testing on Outlook 2013 and Exchange 2010 version 14.03.0224.002

Thanks,

Alex

Hi Alex,

Please check the Permissions tab in your posting.

Regards,

Well I'm the owner of the folder:

Hi Alex,

Please check the Permissions tab in your posting.

Hi Alex,

Please make sure the Test public folder in your posting is a Contact type folder. If it is not a Contact type folder, there would be no Outlook Address Book tab.

Please note it is a folder which is the type of Contact instead of just a folder contains other subfolders. For example, it is Contact1 and Public Contact in my picture above. It is not the Contact folder which contains Contact1 and Public Contact.

Re

Hi Winnie,

I confirm the test folder is a contact folder. In the properties you can see it is a "Folder containing Contact Items", but still no address book tab:

     

I tested both on Outlook 2013 (left screenshot) and 2010 on the right.

I'm still using Exchange 2010 for testing.

Thanks for your help,

Alex