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New Global Address List 2

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Mighty

Programmer
Feb 22, 2001
1,682
US
Is it possible to generate a new Global Address list in Exchange that pulls contact information from the backend database of a CRM system. Ideally this address list should also be able to be synchronised and made available offline

Mighty
 
The default Global Address List contains all mail-enabled items in AD, you can't configue it to narrow down what is shown.

with that said you could create a new Address List that you have filtering control over. You could then use your backend CRM to populate a AD OU with your contacts and then have this new Address List only pick up items from this OU (or you may need to use a Query Based Distribution List to filter you selections).

Hope this helps.
 
Unfortunately that all went right over my head.

Didn't think that I would be able to use the standard Global Address list but was hoping that I would be able to create another one.

The CRM contact list will be contantly changing with people being added and removed. So the address list would need to be dynamic.

Mighty
 
That's correct. the Default Global Address list can't be edited.

you can create a new one and call it what you want. But I don't think you can point it to your CRM applications. What you have to do it get your CRM application to create the contacts in Active Director and then configure the new address list to pick up these contacts.

If you can get your CRM application to export the detials to a CSV file then you can use CSVDE.EXE command line util to import / create the contacts in AD.
 
So basically:

Create new AD CRM OU
Export CRM contacts to a CSV file
Run CSVDE.EXE to import the CRM contacts into the new AD OU
Create new Global Address List in Exchange System Manager to pull data from new OU.

Is that correct or am I missing something??

Mighty
 
yes that's about it.

I've just been looking at the settings for the filtering for Address Lists (they work of LDAP queries). So rather than pulling the data from the OU you need to work out a way that identifes these contacts. For example you could populate the "description" field of all the contacts to have the same value and then create the address list to only contains contacts that match the value specified in the description field.

I'll still store the imported / created contacts in a seperate OU though, just to keep things tidy.

One quick change. use LDIFDE rather than CSVDE. (sorry for any confusion).

 
Thanks a million - I will try that out and see how I get on.

Mighty
 
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