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David SpigelmanFlag for United States of America

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Hosted Exchange Shared Contacts

Just moved a client into Exchange Online. One of the reasons they wanted this solution was because they have a large Contacts List that needs to be shared. To accommodate this need, we created a shared mailbox and uploaded all the contacts there.

At the client side, we add the shared mailbox to the list of additional mailboxes opened during startup, and we're now able to access those contacts without a problem. BUT we can't seem to get that shared Contacts list to show up when we're trying to send a message. We can open a new message, click To, and all that shows up are the Offline Global Address Book, the users' own Contacts Lists, etc. We can't seem to get the shared list to show up.

Any suggestions?
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Amit
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OMG - what a backwards way of doing this! I mean, thanks for the links and all - your response may well be the solution - but CLEARLY Microsoft didn't think this through very well!

So, to use this, we need to install CodeTwo on each machine, and then create a new Contacts list in each mailbox. Then, we use CodeTwo to sync the shared list to the new folder. Now, whenever anything is updated locally or in the shared list, we click the sync button, which syncs the two folders. I do this on every workstation. There should be no duplicates because the local folder always starts out as empty. Is that right?! Geez!
Ya that's rights, now think this way, suppose user sent an email using different email address to a user. Now as that user is just a contact and doesn't have any mailbox, now how other person is going to reply back.

Better option would be to use room mailboxes and share them to user who needs access. Using Room mailbox user can send email and also can get the email back to room mailbox.

Let me know if that helps.
I'll have to look into that "room mailbox" thing. Not sure what that is. But in our case, that wouldn't really apply anyway. We have a mail account that we're sharing to all the users. So if the user sends out mail from the Info user, and the recipient replies, it's going to go into the Info mailbox, which actually does exist. My issue isn't that. It's just that I need to be able to have all the users send To people on that shared contact list. And right now, they won't show up in the GAL because they're not THAT USER.
Solution is that there is no solution. We've confirmed this with Microsoft Support. CodeTwo is an alternative. Microsoft's solution was that, over time, the contacts they commonly write to, will wind up being in their Suggested Contacts list anyway. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, though.