Monday, September 24, 2007

The end-user is always right


I got a call today from a user complaining that she couldn't see one of our company contacts in her email address list when composing a new email in Outlook. At first she thought the person in charge of keeping the contact lists up to date had failed in her duties. I was able to see the contact OK and wondered why she couldn't.

It turns out that each Outlook client must be configured at the user workstation to include public contacts as Outlook address lists. Apparently she hadn't done this. Just right click on the public contact folder, select properties, Outlook address book tab, then check the box for 'Show this folder as an email address book'. Do the same for subfolders.

When I advised her of the procedure to do this, she asked, "Did I do something wrong?" I replied, "Of course not. I should have set this up for you in advance." Sigh. That's what computer guys are for, right? I suppose I should put stuff like this on our intranet. It keeps coming up over and over again. But then nobody reads the intranet even when I tell them the answers are there.

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