[David Haddad]

We are a small business that used a hosted BES plan. I would like each employee to be able to have their own Outlook contacts which they can access from their BB (which is how it works now), but much more importantly, we really need all of our BES users to be able to access a common address book that contains our customers contact info. For example, a tech in the field needs to be able to look up a customers address from his BB.

How would I accomplish this? My preference is for it to be automatic and seamless, that is, I add a contact to my contacts folder and it is immediately available to all company BES users.

Thank You

[nobody7290]

If you are on a hostesd BES, chances a not very good that this can be done without manual work or third party software.

The easiest thing, if you have only a few mailboxes would be:
Designate someone to maintain the shared adresses in an extra outlook address folder in his mailbox and let him copy these at regular intervals to the other contact folders.

With BES 5.X it is possible to use more then one Address-book.
You can use contacts stored in public folders. However, they are read-only.
And it depends on the hoster if you are able to use this feature.

BES 4.x can also uses the global address book, but it also depends on the hoster if you can edit this. In addition I dont know of any easy way to edit it.

Maybe the simplest thing is, try outlook Web-Access from the Blackberry to acess a special account where your shared contacts are stored.

[David Haddad]

Thanks, very helpful. Right now we are using shared contacts which makes it easy for everyone to access out contacts via Outlook, just not via Blackberry. I think I will contact my hosting provider and see if they can provide access to a shared address book. They have done some special things for me in the past so it is worth a call. If not with all the Outlook sync options out there it should not be too difficult to come up with some option that everyone can access via BB over the web.

Thanks again, and I'm open to suggestions if anyone else with a small company has addressed this issue.