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David Overton's Blog » How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory

So you may remember the call for help that led to the article How to add public folders to the list of contacts in Outlook:

We currently have several public folders which contain email address and contact information for people outside of our company that we want to keep up with.

I would like to put these in the All Contacts list on the server, so everyone can open it and reference it when sending email.

The only thing I can find it to put them in Active Directory so they can be on the list.  Surely there is another way to get this done, but how.

I also am not opposed to manually typing them in (and weeding out old contacts), but don't feel very comfortable putting 800 outsiders in my AD.

Having proposed the solution in the above link, I then got back the following reply:

Thanks David for the reply.  I have some address books in the public folder that I have done that to, but was trying to move away from the public folder and have the addresses included in the "All Contacts"  under the "All Addresses" section for the organization.

Is there a way to do that?

Well there is a way - there is a huge difference between a contact in Active Directory and a User.  If you add “contacts” to the AD they will appear in the address lists.  Personally, I would suggest that to avoid anyone accidently sending a mail to a customer instead of someone internally you did not merge the two lists together, but you could export your contacts via Outlook and then use a script to load them into AD as contacts.

A scripted way to add contacts from a CSV or Excel file can be found at http://computerperformance.co.uk/vbscript/vbscript_contact_create.htm#Example_2:_Script_to_create_a_Contact_from_Spreadsheet_Data_

 

Ttfn

David

Posted Fri, Apr 13 2007 12:01 AM by David Overton
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Comments

Terinea Tech Tips wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Tue, Apr 24 2007 2:12 PM
I don't understand why I can't add new contacts directly from my outlook to the Active Directory?
David Overton wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Sun, Apr 29 2007 11:11 PM

Terinea,

each persons address list in Outlook is their personal list.  The active directory is designed to be a list of user, computers and other settings related to the running of the Network.  For this reason the two are kept seperate.

thanks

David

Don wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Fri, Oct 26 2007 12:57 PM

Is there a limit in SBS to the number of external contacts that one can add?

David Overton wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Thu, Nov 1 2007 12:04 AM

Don, you can add as many contacts as you want.

ttfn

David

Jeff wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Thu, Apr 3 2008 7:10 PM

Hi David,

I just added 2 new Contacts with external email addresses in AD. I cannot get them to show up in the GAL. I have other external contacts set up that do show in the list - everything looks the same on the 2 new ones.

The changes have replicated out to the other servers, I just can't figure out why the don't show in the list.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jeff

Rob Abdul wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Thu, Jul 8 2010 4:57 PM

That's for this David.

jnelconcpath wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Tue, Dec 14 2010 2:20 AM

I know this is very old, but I had to comment. The reason the contacts aren't showing up in the GAL is because of the changes Microsoft made with SBS 2008 and Exchange 2007.  In SBS 2003, you used to be able to add an external  contact right from within AD and it would add an email address to the GAL with the permission of Exchange 2003.  WIth SBS 2008 and Exchange 2007, you will find a container under Recipient Configuration (in the Exchange 2007 console) called Mail Contact.  This is where the contacts now need to be created in order to have them show up in the GAL.  

The relationship between AD and Exchange was altered in SBS 2008.

john wrote re: How to add external contacts to the GAL (global address list or the list of names found by default in Outlook) by adding them to Active Directory
on Thu, Jun 23 2011 6:52 PM

I am facing the same problem with SBS 2011 and Exchange 2010.  I followed the procedure above, but the Contacts still do not appear in the list of people to choose from when I'm building Distribution lists.  Can you help me?

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