Sharing a synchronizing Outlook Contacts folder with other users and with our native Android Contacts app

Question

This seems like it should be a simple, commonly needed functionality but for some reason I cannot find a satisfactory solution. I'm hoping someone has some advice and can point me in the right direction.

My business partner and I run a very small business and we both add contacts to our Outlook Contact folder as we meet people. In the past we used a shared Outlook Public folder for this purpose which automatically synchronized with our phones. (Android native Contacts app) All contact information was sync'd. (i.e., contact photo, addresses, phone numbers, notes...etc.) We were also able to choose from this shared Contacts folder when selecting an email recipient within Outlook.

Unfortunately, things have changed and we can no longer achieve all of the following things:

1. Synchronizing full contact info (contact photo, notes, numbers...etc.) across platforms (both Outlook and Android Contacts) AND between users.
2. Allowing this same synchronized Contact folder to be accessed when choosing a contact to email via Outlook.

I may be missing something really obvious here, and if so I apologize. Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide!

Answer 1

Hi @J MacGillivray ，

In the past we used a shared Outlook Public folder for this purpose which automatically synchronized with our phones. (Android native Contacts app)

By "shared Outlook Public folder", are you referring to the shared Outlook contacts folder introduced in this article?
Do you mean this has been working flawlessly in the past but suddenly does not work anymore?
Could you provide more details about the issue symptom, like is there any error message when users fail to access the shared contacts folder.

From the perspective of Exchange server and Outlook desktop client, I'd suggest trying to double confirming if the folder permission of the shared contacts folder has been set properly. Or you can test by creating a new contact folder and see if it can be shared and synchronized as expected.

Besides, since the "Outlook" tag is just for general questions related to the Outlook desktop client so I am afraid I can hardly help regarding the issue on the Android native contacts app. Given this, you can try reaching out to the support for the Android mobile as well to see if they can shed some light on it.

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Answer 2

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