Introduction
Many of the contacts used by Speakeasy need to be accessible to multiple staff members. Whilst each staff member can store their own contacts, this can lead to difficulties. e.g. consider the case where two staff members, A and B, each have a “John Smith” contact stored in their own contact list. John Smith notifies staff member A of a change in email address or mobile number, so A changes the details in their contact list. Subsequently, staff member B tries to contact John Smith, but the staff member has details which are out of date because they weren’t made aware of the change. Whilst there are other mechanisms for sharing contacts, this still works on the basis of their being multiple contact details held by multiple staff members. The answer is to hold all contacts in a shared folder, so that there is only one definitive copy of the contact details, and any change is immediately available to all users who have access to that shared folder.
This document describes how to create a shared contact.
Instructions
From Outlook, navigate to “More Apps…Folders”. This can also be done by clicking the “Ctrl” and the “6” key together, then selecting “Folders”. The screenshot below shows the “More Apps” icon highlighted and the view after this has been clicked:
Assuming the user clicks their “Contacts” folder in the the left-hand side pane of Outlook, then that pane should appear similar to the following screenshot below (for simplicity, there is just a single contact in the user’s own contact area):
To make “Joe Bloggs” a shared contact available to other users, drag the contact from the “Contacts” folder and drop it in the “All Public Folders…Speakeasy…SharedContacts” folder. Alternatively, a new contact can be created in the share folder by first selecting the “All Public Folders…Speakeasy…SharedContacts” folder and clicking “Add New Contact”. See the screenshot below:
Complete all details and click “Save & Close”
Now, having shared the contact or created a new share contact, if any user creates a new email, they can access the shared contact by selecting the “SharedContacts” address book, as shown below:
As state earlier, as there is only one definitive copy of the contact, any changes made to a contact by any staff member will be instantly available to any other staff member has access to the SharedContacts address book.
Additional Information
To find out how the shared contact folder was originally created, see the following article: