I have hosted exchange through microsoft and they currently provide this on Exchange 2007, and we use Outlook 2007 to access the hosted Exchange server. With hosted Exchange we can't use public folders. So a main contact set is shared to several administrative users. They are able to see these contacts in Outlook and make edits, no problem...but that's as far as the convenience goes. Outlook and Windows search do not synchronize or index these shared contacts (as opposed to public contacts). So while my user can edit and add and delete contacts as editors of the main contact set, they can't use that shared contact set as an address book to send an email to a client through the To: dialog in an email creation, or even use the quick search in Outlook to scroll to a contact that may be deep into the shared contact set, so they are stuck with getting to a contact from outside of Outlook, through the windows search desktop bar 9which oddly will find a contact in the shared contact folder, while search within Outlook will not look through that folder), OR scrolling through 13,000 contacts to find the one to make an edit on, or creating the contact locally and copying it into the shared set, and following the contact merge...very frustrating, because shared contacts is so close to being a good fit ...but MSFT programming won't seem to allow for that last couple of steps. I could see if the contacts had limited access or something, but it seems that just because these shared contacts are under the People's Contacts line in the lower part of the left-hand hierarchy instead of up under the My contacts line, that they are treated differently for these two actions of assigning them as an address book and indexing and searching from within Outlook. Please help, I'd love to figure out a way to make this work. any guidance would be helpful, as I've tried lots of options so far and just run into roadblocks. thanks

On Mon, 2 Aug 2010 19:07:16 +0000, jarrod731 wrote: >I have hosted exchange through microsoft and they currently provide this on Exchange 2007, and we use Outlook 2007 to access the hosted Exchange server. With hosted Exchange we can't use public folders. So a main contact set is shared to several administrative users. They are able to see these contacts in Outlook and make edits, no problem...but that's as far as the convenience goes. Outlook and Windows search do not synchronize or index these shared contacts (as opposed to public contacts). So while my user can edit and add and delete contacts as editors of the main contact set, they can't use that shared contact set as an address book to send an email to a client through the To: dialog in an email creation, or even use the quick search in Outlook to scroll to a contact that may be deep into the shared contact set, so they are stuck with getting to a contact from outside of Outlook, through the windows search desktop bar 9which oddly will find a contact in the shared contact >folder, while search within Outlook will not look through that folder), OR scrolling through 13,000 contacts to find the one to make an edit on, or creating the contact locally and copying it into the shared set, and following the contact merge...very frustrating, because shared contacts is so close to being a good fit ...but MSFT programming won't seem to allow for that last couple of steps. I could see if the contacts had limited access or something, but it seems that just because these shared contacts are under the People's Contacts line in the lower part of the left-hand hierarchy instead of up under the My contacts line, that they are treated differently for these two actions of assigning them as an address book and indexing and searching from within Outlook. Please help, I'd love to figure out a way to make this work. any guidance would be helpful, as I've tried lots of options so far and just run into roadblocks. thanks Are you using BPOS? Use Sharepoint. --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP --- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP

Hi jarrod, You could post your issue on below forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/category/microsoftonlineservices Regards Gavin

apparently sharepoint won't work for me either, as sharepoint contacts don't show up inside Outlook as usable contacts, you have to be in the sharepoint app. Please set me straight if this is not accurate, but I asked to make sure several times with the tech advisor. So my goal of having indexed usable contacts in outlook doesn't get met by using sharepoint. since windows search indexes the contacts, I suppose I'll just have to use the workaround (copying the contacts into a subfolder once a week or so) until the problem is solved with an update or Outlook 2010.