Multiple Address Books in Microsoft Exchange Online

One commonly used feature of Exchange that Microsoft Exchange Online does not support is the ability to have multiple address books. Companies use seperate address books to segment users by location, department, or even house external recipients. There are a several different ways to go about creating this same functionality with Microsoft Online. We’ll explore a couple different options. First, if you have purchased SharePoint Online, you can create a SharePoint list containing contacts. If you don’t have SharePoint, another more complicated way to work around this limitation is to use the LDAP address book functionality in Outlook along with your local Active Directory.

First we’ll demonstrate the SharePoint method as it would be the preferred method in most cases. Step 1 is to create a Contact List within SharePoint. From the Actions Menu choose Create. Then choose Contacts under the Communications category.

After it has been created, you can begin entering the contact information in SharePoint.

Once the information is in SharePoint, you will need to connect the list to Outlook. From the Actions Menu choose Connect to Outlook.

Once connected to Outlook, you will be able to go to Contacts and see the SharePoint contact list as show below.

The contacts will also be availble when opening the Address Book.

If you haven’t purchased SharePoint Online, there is another method to create multiple address books when on Microsoft Online. It’s a lot more complicated, but is an option if you really need multiple address books. This option creates contacts in Active Directory which Outlook can use as LDAP address book.Continue reading for the details.

If you haven’t purchased SharePoint Online, there is another method to create multiple address books when on Microsoft Online. It’s a lot more complicated, but is an option if you really need multiple address books. This option creates contacts in Active Directory which Outlook can use as LDAP address book. Continue reading for the details.

The first step is get the contact information into your Active Directory. Depending on what format the contacts currently exist in, the steps to get them into Active Directory may be different. The most common way would be to get the information into a CSV file and then use the command line utility CSVDE to import the contact objects. The steps to do that are beyond the scope of this walk through, but feel free to contact MessageOps if you need assistance.

When importing the contacts it is recommended you import them into their own OU so that you can better scope the search query. In the screenshot below you’ll notice that an OU called Vendors has been created and contacts for the vendors have been created in this OU.

Once you have the contacts entered, if you are running the Microsoft Online Directory Synchronization, you’ll need to make sure it doesn’t pick them up and synchronize them to Microsoft Online. Excluding objects from the Directory Synchronization isn’t the easiest thing to do. For these contacts to be excluded you’ll need to set the mailnickname on each to CAS_{email address}.

The reason for entering the mailnickname is explained in the MessageOps Directory Synchronization in Depth document. Obviously if you have a lot of contact objects, you won’t want to script a solution to set the mailnickname on all objects in the OU. Contact MessageOps if you would like a copy of the script to perform this action.

Now you are ready to configure Outlook. Again, there are many different ways to configure Outlook. If you have a few clients, you can configure them manually. If you have numerous clients which you need to configure you can create a PRF file which can be applied to the clients. For more information see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179232.aspx. In this example we’ll show the manual process.

Within Outlook go to the Tools->Account Settings and then choose the Address Books Tab.

Click the New button and choose Internet Directory Service (LDAP) and click next. Fill out the information with your domain controller name and username and password.

Click the More Settings button and enter a Display Name for the Address Book, in this case Vendors.

Clicking on the Search tab allows you to configure additional settings. In the seach base, enter the DN of the OU that the contact objects are created in. If the Enable Browsing box is checked, when users open the Address Book, all the objects in the Address Book will be displayed. If unchecked, the end user will first have to enter a keyword to search for and a list of objects which match their query will be returned.

Click OK/Next until you are out of the wizard and back in Outlook. Restart Outlook and then open the Address Book. You should see the Vendors Address Book Listed. Opening the Address Book will list the contacts that were entered in Active Directory.

We should mention some limitations of this approach:

• The address book is not cached. Users have to have a connection to the domain controller for this to work.
• If you have a large number of contacts, and browsing is enabled, it may take a considerable amount of time to generate the address book when it is opened by the users.