Sharing E-mail Contacts

[Joanne]

OK - I've got a problem in a school and I thought I had resolved it, but apparently it is not good enough.

 

SBM wants to share Parent contact e-mails with the admin assistant. She wants the list to be central and update on both machines. We use Office 365 and our provider (BTLS) have said that this is not possible within Office 365 or the Outlook client (2010). I have shared the contact list with the admin assistant and she now has the ability to e-mail parents.

 

I thought it was solved.

 

However, she wants to be able to e-mail individual parents. So I guess I have to import the contacts into her outlook?

 

I have also suggested perhaps having a shared spreadsheet with the e-mails on.

 

Does anyone have a solution to this issue? At my fulltime school we use ParentMail, so we don't have this problem!

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Le edit: forgot to mention that I tried using the Share Contacts button to no avail: ACCESS IS DENIED!

Edited July 14, 2016 by Joanne

[Steve21]

Can't you just open the contact folder (or make a new one for parents) and then share it? Same like a calendar works

 

Steve

[Joanne]

It said that access was denied when I tried that last week. Which is why I contacted our provider.

[Steve21]

Sounds more like a permissions issue on their (provider) side that's set rather than o365, as we certainly can share it and via outlook etc :s

 

Take it both users are within same domain (email wise) etc?

 

Steve

[DJ-1701]

OK - I've got a problem in a school and I thought I had resolved it, but apparently it is not good enough.

 

SBM wants to share Parent contact e-mails with the admin assistant. She wants the list to be central and update on both machines. We use Office 365 and our provider (BTLS) have said that this is not possible within Office 365 or the Outlook client (2010). I have shared the contact list with the admin assistant and she now has the ability to e-mail parents.

 

I thought it was solved.

 

However, she wants to be able to e-mail individual parents. So I guess I have to import the contacts into her outlook?

 

I have also suggested perhaps having a shared spreadsheet with the e-mails on.

 

Does anyone have a solution to this issue? At my fulltime school we use ParentMail, so we don't have this problem!

 

Thanks in advance!

 

You should be able to share the contacts with someone else in Office 2010...

 

I know this is geared at 2013 and above, but have a look at the 'Revoke or change other people's access' section in this article https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Share-a-contacts-folder-with-others-CE5A40D1-BC9F-4F5D-A2AA-5EC388573821

[Joanne]

Yep, same domain. They use Outlook 2010 (which I hate!)... not that that makes much difference!

[Joanne]

You should be able to share the contacts with someone else in Office 2010...

 

I know this is geared at 2013 and above, but have a look at the 'Revoke or change other people's access' section in this article https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Share-a-contacts-folder-with-others-CE5A40D1-BC9F-4F5D-A2AA-5EC388573821

 

Yeah that's the article that I tried and 'Access is Denied'... poet and I don't know it

[jdoyle]

sounds like a recipe for a Data Protection disaster.

 

Parent contact info should be stored in one location (e.g. SIMs), kept up to date in that location and used from that location only as the single source of truth e.g. by ParentMail as per your other school.

[Joanne]

Thanks, I'll bring this up. The spreadsheet will only be available to the 2 users, but I will mention this.

[pantscat]

An Office 365 Public Folder would do the job - you can assign permissions on it to restrict who could see it, and set it so that it contains contact items.

 

Might not be the most elegant solution, but it'll fit your requirements.

 

As @jdoyle has said though, duplicating this sort of data will lead to a massive pain in the neck when it comes to keeping it accurate.

[Joanne]

Yeah. I've suggested that everything is updated in SIMS and then they can take a csv if needs be. It's all really messy!

[dapaulio]

For this we have InTouch (similar to Parent Mail which we used to have but ditched it because of numerous service outages and problems). Integrates directly with SIMS and ticks all the boxes when it comes to red tape stuff eg data protection, privacy etc the only drawback is that staff have learnt they can also email each other using it rather than using our internal messaging system

[Cache]

It would be far from the ideal way of doing it, but you could butcher the way we do our admin account assuming BTLS give you the required access.

 

Our Admin account is a shared mailbox, we then disable the automapping on the account and manually connect the account up to Outlook. By manually adding the account to Outlook, you can access the shared mailbox addressbook from the new email box, having Outlook Automap the account doesn't present this option.

 

If you want the powershell instructions let me know.