Re: Combing Multiple User Contact Folders into One Shared Folder.
- From: "Karl Timmermans" <karl@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 13:34:33 -0500
Focusing on a single point in your description - a custom written solution
would be the only option if your ultimate requirement is to:
"This centralized Outlook folder would also be used on an ongoing basis,
meaning as the users add new customers to their individual Outlook contacts,
the users should need only check a particular field or select a particular
Category in Outlook, and the result would be that it automatically would
appear in that centralized folder."
Some background info questions/issues:
1) How many user's would have the same "customer" in their contact folder?
If more than one - who is the primary owner of that customer info (if
anyone)
2) Are separate "notes" maintained by different users for the same customer
which would be considered "local" (user-specific) info only versus being
updated to the central folder?
3) If more than one user makes changes to a "customer" contact - what is the
"priority" since this could cause an endless raft of back and forth changes
(assuming that not only new customers are to be added but somewhere along
the line - existing information needs to be updated
......................lots more questions/issues
In terms of any importing/exporting requirements in the interim - you may
find this info on ContactGenie DataPorter & Exporter Premium of interest -
both allow for updating of "existing" info with filter capability to target
only the info you want
DataPorter - http://www.contactgenie.com/cg20features.htm
Exporter - http://www.contactgenie.com/cgxfeatures.htm
Karl
______________________________________________________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - Importer/DataPorter/Exporter/Toolkit
"Contact import/export/data management tools for Outlook '2000/2007"
http://www.contactgenie.com
<Sean Doherty> wrote in message news:2009114115419sean.doherty@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi there, folks, and thanks for reading.
We are using Outlook 2003 and have MS Exchange Server that allows sharing
of folders.
What we are trying to do is create a centralized, read-only shared list of
contacts that pulls only certain contacts from a group of individual
users.
To put it another way, our users each maintain their own Outlook Contact
folders. Within those indepentdently located user Contact folders are our
customers. The users also have non-customer contacts in their Contact
folders, such as friends, family, vendors, professional contacts, etc.
We would like to get a centralized Outlook Contact folder of all their
customers only, and exclude their other non-Customer contacts. This
project is not for the use or particular benefit of our users (compliance
stuff), so our users are not likely to take detailed steps in maintaining
this process on their own, so an "easy to them" solution is required on
our part.
This centralized Outlook folder would also be used on an ongoing basis,
meaning as the users add new customers to their individual Outlook
contacts, the users should need only check a particular field or select a
particular Category in Outlook, and the result would be that it
automatically would appear in that centralized folder.
To date, I cannot seem to find a solution within Outlook that meets our
particular needs.
The users do not want to maintain two separate contact folders (one
shareable and one not) if it can be avoided.
One of our end products would be an Export to *.csv of all the Customer
data on a regular basis.
As it stands now, our solution is going to be going to the client's desks
for periodic Exports of the data into Excel, filtering out records that
are not flagged with the category "Customer", and then re-importing the
filtered data back into a shared Contacts folder on one of our machines.
This is a very imperfect solution that will no doubt result in stale data.
However, it is the only solution at this point that least inconveniences
our userbase, which is one of our concerns.
I hope that a more elegant solution to our problem can be found.
Any thoughts?
I apologize for the length of the post, as I was hoping to fully explain
what we need, and what we can and cannot do at this point.
Thanks in advance for any and all replies.
EggHeadCafe - Software Developer Portal of Choice
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