If you are using Outlook and Microsoft Exchange to manage your contacts and emails, there are fantastic facilities available that most businesses barely touch.
In a recent project we needed to provide 14 consultants that work all over the country, with the facility to access and update a shared contact database form their own laptops. We did this by creating customised contact forms within Outlook that efficiently synchronise with the Exchange server at head office. The system depends on the Exchange server being available via a VPN (Virtual Private Network) but the normal process of running Outlook with an .ost file for backup means that the contacts can be updated off line and then synchronised with the Exchange server when available.
A very neat solution that ensures that everybody can add and amend new contacts without having to go through cumbersome administrative procedures.
Note: If you want to be able to synchronise the ‘Views’ in order to run pre-determined mail merge routines, then the computer must be running version 2002 of Outlook.