Is there a way to prevent an External Contacs list from showing up in the GAL/Offline Address Book BUT still have some users still be able to find and send to the contacts? This is on Exchange 2007.If I hide the External Contacts from the GAL, no one can find them and send email to them.

They will have to manually type out the smtp address.

Hi Dave, From your description, I guess that you would like to hide the contacts from the Global Address Lists for some users. For some other users, they need to be able to get the Contacts from GAL. If I am off base, please let me know. If I am right, I would like to explain that you need to create two Global Address Lists: One including Contact and the other does not include contacts. In addition, you need to create two Offline Address Book based on the two Global Address lists separately. Then, you need to configure related permission to have some users are able to get the Global Address List which including contacts and download the OAB which including the contacts. The other users get the Global Address List which does not include contacts and download related OAB which not includes contacts. For detailed steps, you could refer to following whitepaper: White Paper: Configuring Virtual Organizations and Address List Segregation in Exchange 2007 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb936719.aspx Mike

Thanks Mike Shen, I think I saw the same answer posted Friday, may even have been you. You did understand exactly what I was trying to do. I was just hoping for a quick and easy solution, like being able to tell the GAL what address lists to include with a simple check box approach, which should be easily doable. Then I could have had the couple users configure Outlook to download all address lists. Oh well, maybe the Exchange people can work on that. It shouldn't be this difficult, especially for small businesses.Thanks!!Dave

Hi Dave, Please understand that Global Address List is a single Address List which does not including other Address Lists (for example: All Users and so). The Exchange Server updates the Address Lists when new users are created based on the recipientfilter configured on the Address Lists. Actually, the Address List is saved as an attribute (showInAddressBook) of User object. For example, a user belongs to Default Global Address List and All users Address List. The user objects showInAddressBook attribute will include the two address lists: CN=Default Global Address Lists CN=All Users By default, the Default Global Address Lists include all mailbox enabled users, mail enabled users, contacts, mail enabled groups and so on. Mike