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In an Exchange environment, if you share contacts between users, you may have come across the issue where the shared contacts do not show up in the address book – this causes problems mainly because when you are selecting a contact from within a new message (ie when you click on the To or CC field and/or when you click on the address book icon) these shared contacts will not show up.

There is no way to get shared contacts to show up in this manner – as you will also find, if you right click and goto the properties for the shared contacts, you do not get the outlook address book tab.

The Work Around

There is a way around this. Instead of using shared contacts as a globally available address book, use public contacts. Public contacts can be implemented as follows:

Server-side setup: Goto Exchange system manager, expand “folders”, right click on public folders and select new>public folder. Give the folder an appropriate name (this will be your shared contacts folder) and click on OK.

Client Setup: These instructions are based on Outlook 2003. Open outlook. In the left hand pane, down the bootom, find the yellow folder icon (if you hover over the icon, it will be labeled “folder List”. Click this icon and you will be presented with a full list of folders. Expand “Public Folders” and then “all public folders”. You should then see the folder you created in step 1. Right click this folder and goto properties. Click on the Outlook Address book tab and check the box labeled “Show this folder in outlook address book”. Click on OK.

Now click on the Outlook Address book and goto Tools, Options. You will see three option boxes: Show this address list first, Keep personal Addresses in and Check names using these address lists in the following order. As appropriate, select the public contacts lists as the default for each of these options (I normally make it the default for all three).

Now, when you compose a new message and click on the To or CC fields,  you should be presented with these shared contacts.

Lastly, if you already have contacts else where that you want to make publicly available, simply export the contacts, then select the public contacts folder and goto Import>Import into current folder and select the PST file where you created your backup.