How to get your contacts folder to appear first when you click the To button in a new message
This week I had the great fortune of having to export all my mailbox to an Outlook data file (.pst) on my client computer, replace the Exchange databases with new, blank databases, and import my Mailbox from the data file on the client. All this was done on the direction of PSSupport Engineer because we could not get the Public Folders to mount, even though the mailboxes were working properly. There are several bad things that happen when you do this:
- You lose your views. (You should export these first, but I have not found out how to do this. The Support Engineer should show you how to do this, but mine didn’t and I didn’t think to ask that it be done.)
- You lose your rules (Help will tell you how to do this, but you do it through the Rules Wizard by clicking the Options button in the Rules and Alerts display window.)
- You can’t open the Contacts folder that is listed when you click the To button on a new message.
- All the associations between contacts and journal messages and other items you have designated are lost. (You prevent this from happening by not using the Export/Import wizards. Instead, you should drag the mailbox folder to the opened pst folder list, and reverse the process when you restore. I don’t think my Support Engineer had a clue about the implications of choosing Export/Import or Drag n Drop. They were just equivalent processes to him.)
I will show here how one gets one contact folder to appear when the To button brings up the list. In my case, it brings up a Contacts folder that cannot be accessed—so I had an incentive to fix it fast. But it is not something that one would discover if one had not done it before, in an earlier life as a cockroach named Archie.
The first step in the sequence is to select your Contacts folder (and you will probably want to do this step on all of them), right-button click it and select Properties. Once the properties panel appears, click the Outlook Address Book tab. All this is shown in Figure 1
Figure 1: The Outlook Address Book tab of a Contacts Folder’s property panel
You want to check the box that is labeled Show this forlder as an e-mail Address Book and you want to add something to the Name of the address book so that you can recognize this folder from others that will appear in a list, which will all be named Contacts if you do not change them. Click OK and go back to the Outlook main screen.
The Contacts folder is now named, but the To button still brings up a Contacts folder I can’t access. So the next step is to examine some object that presents the Outlook Address Book. I say it this way, because we have to keep in mind that the OAB doesn’t exist as a separate thing, like the little white book we all use to keep our personal telephone numbers, and sometimes the mailing address of that number. It is really just a screen object that is displaying a view of an Contacts folder, or the collection of Contacts folders. So, starting from the Inbox, Figure 2 shows the menu clicks you have to do to get to a display of the OAB.
Figure 2: The menu choices you need to make to get to the OAB
From the Inbox, Tools -> Address book will get you to a display of the Outlook Address Book.
Figure 3 shows the OAB after you click that final menu option, and then droping down the list box to see the Contact Folders that will show in the OAB.
Figure 3: The list of Contact folder objects that can be shown in the OAB
As you see, there are other objects, such as the Global Address List, that can be shown in the OAB. They aren’t really contact folders, but, given the wonderful generality of object classes, these other things can also be viewed, and I presume that there are people who know for what they are useful. I shall ignore them in this small note.
Notice also that the spurious Contacts folder, that doesn’t allow you to see anything is right there at the top of the list, and by default, comes up first if you do not set something else to be first. Unfortunately, just selecting the folder we renamed in this list does not make it the default folder for display in the list.
The default setting is hidden somewhere else. I first thought it would be in the properties of this display object, but it is not there. It is, in fact, in the Addressing dialog box, which lives behind the Tools -> Options menu. Figure 4 shows these menu options.
Figure 4: The Menu choices you need to make to reach the Addressing Dialog Box.
Figure 5 shows the Addressing Dialog Box and the drop down list from which you set the default first Contacts Folder to be displayed in the OAB, when it is brought to life by clicking the To button in a new message.
Figure 5: The selection of the Contacts folder to be shown first when you click the To: button in a new message.
So, that is how you set the first Contacts Folder that you see when you click the To button. However, because it is a very intricate process, you want to test things out, just to be sure that you did not make a mistake somewhere. Figure 6 shows what I see when I click the To button on a new message form.
Figure 6: The top of the OAB after clicking the To button in a new message on my Hollis client computer.
Thus ends a successful trip of discovery through the mobius strip that connects Outlook, on the client machine, to the Exchange server on the central server machine.
