4. Contact Integration
SharePoint includes a built-in list template that
allows you to create and manage contacts within a website. Columns that
are part of this list are all the expected ones, such as First Name,
Last Name, Email Address, Company, and Notes. In general, these are the
same columns that you find for a contact record within Outlook.
There are many advantages to having SharePoint
manage contacts. Having a centrally stored set of contacts for a
department or a team site saves staff from having to maintain
individual contact lists. Since the list is stored in SharePoint, as
opposed to a contact entry within Active Directory, users can easily
add, update, and remove contacts as needed. It's also much easier to
store separate contact lists with only those contact records that are
relevant. For example, you may want to store a single set of contacts
that are relevant to a project and keep these separate from other
contact lists.
Of course, storing the list in SharePoint offers all
the SharePoint list benefits, such as versioning, item-level security,
and creating multiple views (such as showing all contacts grouped by a
region). Figure 10 shows how a populated contact list looks inside SharePoint.
As with all lists and libraries, you use the Action
menu in SharePoint to connect to a contact list. After confirming the
connection in Outlook, the contact list will be created and cached
inside your SharePoint Lists.pst file. You can find it along with your other contact lists when you click the Contacts link in the navigation pane.
Since this appears in Outlook as just another
contact list, you have all the benefits of a regular contact list. For
example, you can quickly copy or move entries between contact lists,
contacts can be searched, and you can customize how you want to view
the contacts in Outlook.
Another key benefit is that the contact list by
default is marked as an Outlook address book. This allows you to easily
send an email to a contact by simply using the contact's name. The name
should resolve to the contact's email address. If you want to turn off
this behavior, right-click the Contact list in Outlook and choose
Properties. Click the Outlook Address Book tab and clear the check box,
as shown in Figure 11.
A related feature is to search or browse contacts
from a single list. For example, suppose you are composing a new
message and can't recall the name of a contact. If you click the To
button in the New Message dialog, you can select the desired contact
list in the Address Book drop-down and just scroll through the list of
names, as shown in Figure 12.
