Hi,

In order to be able to search for a contact in any contacts folder you have to have the 'Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book' option ticked under the contacts properties.

This option is never set when a public contacts folder is set up.

Question, does anyone know of a way of automating this? Is there a GPO or a script?

Plus would like to be able to also change the Name of the Address Book.

Alex

I've been doing quite a few Outlook macros recently but the idea of this one was that you could deploy it. I often thought of the same issue - shared address book but you cannot use it by default....

Sounded like a good challange. I did it with a few hacks...

1) Create suitable Outlook macro (ShowAsOutlookAB, AddressBookName )
2) Save as OTM file (Visual Basic for Applications project file)
3) Change macro security to low using a regedit (to get around security issues)
4) run Outlook with the OTM file
5) Reset macro security to previous state

The one I created tends to crash Outlook so it needs a bit more work.... Also, the macro/OTM file needs to be tailored to each company.

I looked at a few other options as well - Outlook GPO doesn't do enough and I could not do it using vbs . I'd love to know if there was an easier way (some kind of Exchange user policy maybe??) and maybe one that didn't require admin rights

-Ivan