We have some executives who have made their admin assistants delegates for contacts.  The delegates are trying to search their boss's contacts in Outlook and they get the error "outlook operation failed. object cannot be found".

When these users are in Cached Exchange Mode, there is no issue. However, we need these users to be in Online mode instead. Is there a way to get it to work? Is Cached Mode a requirement?

The workaround that I have tested is, removing the user as a delegate, then give them permissions to the contact folder, and give the "folder visible" permission at the mailbox level. This seems to work fine. I'm just wondering if there is a better way

Hi,

There is no matter with opening Contact folder permission for Outlook Online mode or Cached mode. Please make sure the folder delegate permission is set to Reviewer or higher:

Get-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity Manager:\Contacts -User Delegate

If the permission is set correctly, please do the following steps in the Delegates Outlook to open the shared contact folder in Online mode:

1. Open Outlook and switch to People/Contact Navigation Pane.

2. Click Open Shared Contacts in Ribbon.

3. Type the user name (Manager) who have shared Contact folder to this user or directly click Name button to select the user.

4. Click OK to open the shared folder.

Then the shared contact folder can be listed under the Contact folder list. And check whether the Contacts can be searched.

Regards,

Hi, 

the issue isn't viewing the shared contacts, the issue is with searching the contacts when in Online mode. I was able to reproduce the problem on my own system. In Cached Mode, I can search contacts for which I am a delegate of. However, in online mode, it throws the error "outlook operation failed. object cannot be found".

If I remove delegate from Outlook, and just setup permissions on the specific mail folders, it works fine

this turned out to be due to KB2956128

• Marked as answer by Pres 13 hours 58 minutes ago