Re: Customer Contact List by Dave
Dave
Fri Dec 23 10:03:42 CST 2005
Personally, I'm opposed to using AD Contacts for this. First of all, as you
point out, the work falls disproportionately on the admin and it's difficult
to delegate. Secondly, I don't really view this as the appropriate way to
handle these contacts (acknowledging that others disagree).
I suggest creating a public folder for this purpose. Set the appropriate
permissions. What we do is to allow everyone to add and edit contacts, then
only supervisory people to delete them. That way, if someone accidentally
messes up a contact, at least it'll still be there for someone to know it
needs to be fixed. You can set the permissions any way that seems effective
for your organization. (Set up the PF in Outlook and configure the
permissions there, then in the folder's properties in each user profile,
click the box to show as an e-mail address book).
We not only use the PF contacts as an e-mail address book. We've also set
up Dymo label printers to print address labels from the PF, and we've
configured Word so we can insert addresses from the PF directly into
documents. There's all kinds of stuff you can do with mail merges, use
Outlook Categories to filter views, etc. - really limitless possibilities.
If any of this sounds like it would be of value to you, I'll be happy to
give you more info about any of the ways we use it. Just post back. (I
probably can't give you any long winded details until the middle of next
week).
Happy Holidays!
"Jeff Foster" <noone@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:u8tXPg8BGHA.1092@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
>I have a multi-part question.
>
> I need to have a customer contact list set up for my users to be able to
> access and email customers from. Obviously, setting up each customer with
> an Active directory user account is out of the question.
>
> Am I correct in thinking that I can accomplish this by setting up a new
> distribution group in Active Directory, and creating new contacts for each
> customer and adding them into the new group? I was also thinking that I
> need to add an additional OU to hold just the customer contacts so as to
> keep them separate from my user accounts, etc. The contacts would contain
> name, address, phone, and the external email address of the cutomer.
>
> Secondly, I have one user that needs to be put in charge of maintaining
> the cutomer contact list. How can I set her up so that she has access to
> add/delete/change contacts without giving her access to any other part of
> Active Directory?
>
> We are running SBS 2000 with users on Windows XP and Outlook 2003.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>