| You can use your Contacts folder and contact items to make your workday easier. Including your vCard with your signature enables you to send your contact information to anyone you communicate with. Sharing your Contacts folder with others enables multiple individuals on an Exchange server to share addresses using a single folder. This can prevent multiple copies of contacts that need updating every time there's a change to one contact item. This chapter has shown you how to create multiple Contacts folders. You can create as many Contacts folders as you want, but be careful about creating too many. There are a number of reasons why you should carefully consider creating multiple Contacts folders: Reminders and follow-up flags do not trigger in folders you create. Follow-up flags trigger only in your default mail folders. So, if you create an alternative Contacts folder and attempt to flag a contact in that folder for follow up, you won't receive a reminder. The contact will appear in red after the flag has passed, but no reminder will trigger. If you create multiple Contacts folders, you'll have to check multiple address books to find a contact you need. This can become a bit confusing. If you don't remember where you stored your contact, you'll have to check every available Contacts folder to send your email. Depending on the reasons for creating multiple Contacts folders, you might have contacts that fall into multiple folders. If you create a Contacts folder for family, holiday cards, and business, it's possible that a contact would need to be placed in both the family folder and the holiday card folder. Another contact might need to be entered in the business folder and the holiday card folder. Now consider what happens when that contact must be updated. Unless you realize that there's an entry for this contact in two different Contacts folders, you could end up with two different versions of the contact. Which is the correct version? There's really no way to tell for sure.
Consider using categories to organize your contacts, rather than using multiple Contacts folders. You can also create new filtered views to group items by category, state, country, company, and custom field. |
