Which is the better approach: public folders with contacts or setting up an address book?

I want to set up some sort of address book to hold details of some of our major clients. Rather than each person maintaining his/her own address list the plan is for everyone to maintain a single list. As soon as we deal with a "new" contact at one of our clients that person's details go into the central list and we all benefit.

In the past we've used public folders. However, it seems to me that they are quite a hassle with OWA so i was wondering why we don't simply create a new address book with:

New-AddressList -Name "MyCo Customers" -RecipientFilter "(CustomAttribute1 -eq 'MyCo') -and (ObjectClass -eq 'Group')" -RecipientContainer "ad.ilbs.co/Habitats/myco"

or should I use New-OfflineAddressBook -Name ...

Our team run a variety of systems (Windows and Mac) and a variety of phones (mostly IOS and Android

Hi Roger,

According to your description, you want to share the contact which is created by each client users in OWA and Outlook to all other domain users for contact sharing. Is it right?

If that is the case, the Public Folder is an option to achieve this as you mentioned. For address list in server side, only the administrators who have related permission to Exchange server can create an address list in Exchange server generally. For client users, they cant create the address list for all other users using, though the contact folder permission is set to reviewer for all other users.

If you are using Public Folder contact (default folder permission set to Author), each user can create contacts in this folder and the contact can be visible for all users. Then the client user can do the following settings in Outlook to manually add the Public Contact to address book:

1. In Outlook, open Public Folder.

2. Right-click Public Contact folder, select Properties.

3. In Outlook Address Book tab, check Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book.

4. Click OK to save the setting.

Then the Public Contact folder should be added in the Address Book.

Regards,

Thanks Winnie

Just to be clear: you recommend using public folder contacts instead of an address book yes?

Can public contacts be accessed in OWA (I had problems getting it right)?

Given that we could create address lists or address books on the server (we have full control), is it still a better option to use public folders?

Sorry if I sound thick, and just to clarify: only internal staff will should be allowed to access and change contact details (i.e. users set up in ES).

On a slight tangent I have this question: what if we have centrally maintained set of address books in addition to the details that our users can access and edit?