Sharing your Outlook contacts with co-workers

By Jamie | July 18, 2007

If your business use Outlook but doesn’t a have centralised system to share contacts with co-work, you can get around this simply by exporting the address list to an Excel compatible file. Then import the file into a co-workers Outlook.

So how do I export them?

Open Outlook and navigate to the contacts section
Click on File > Import and Export
Select “Export to a File” and next
You can select any file here, but “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” is a good bet, especially when your import contacts into other email clients (Thunderbird and iMail, or whatever its called).
You may have more than one Contact address book, so Outlook gives you the option to select others.
Browse to the location you wish to save the file (USB key, shared network drive) and give it a useful file name.
At this point your given the option to change how Outlook exports your contacts. It is very unlikely you will need to change anything here unless you have issues at the import stage using a third party email client. Click on Finish and your done on the exporting part.
Take your exported file to the machine that you wish to import the contacts into. Similar to the first step navigate to the Contacts section and select File > Import and Export.
This time select “Import from another program or file” and click next
Select “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” and click next
Select the file to import and decide on what should happen if contacts are already exist
You may want to import the contacts into a separate folder but usually you will just go with the default.
On the next screen you will be asked if you want to map the fields differently in the contact list, just take the default settings and select finish. Your done!

Five other things you could do with the exported file

Backup file for your contact list
Import them into your personal email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc)
Create mail merger runs in Word
Use them in Excel for client reports etc
Format it in Excel and print it out as a none digital backup, or quick reference list

Dedicated Systems

Products like Microsoft Exchange and CRM Systems allow businesses to share not only contact lists, but tasks and calendars too. I will cover these in depth in the coming weeks along new web services that also offer these facilities. In the mean time two products I think offer good value for money against well known products without compromising on quality and functionality are MailEnable and vTiger CRM system.