Combing Multiple User Contact Folders into One Shared Folder

Hi there, folks, and thanks for reading.

We are using Outlook 2003 and have MS Exchange Server that allows sharing of
folders.

What we are trying to do is create a centralized, read-only shared list of
contacts that pulls only certain contacts from a group of individual users.

To put it another way, our users each maintain their own Outlook Contact
folders. Within those indepentdently located user Contact folders are our
customers. The users also have non-customer contacts in their Contact
folders, such as friends, family, vendors, professional contacts, etc.

We would like to get a centralized Outlook Contact folder of all their
customers only, and exclude their other non-Customer contacts. This project
is not for the use or particular benefit of our users (compliance stuff), so
our users are not likely to take detailed steps in maintaining this process
on their own, so an "easy to them" solution is required on our part.

This centralized Outlook folder would also be used on an ongoing basis,
meaning as the users add new customers to their individual Outlook contacts,
the users should need only check a particular field or select a particular
Category in Outlook, and the result would be that it automatically would
appear in that centralized folder.

To date, I cannot seem to find a solution within Outlook that meets our
particular needs.

The users do not want to maintain two separate contact folders (one
shareable and one not) if it can be avoided.

One of our end products would be an Export to *.csv of all the Customer data
on a regular basis.

As it stands now, our solution is going to be going to the client's desks
for periodic Exports of the data into Excel, filtering out records that are
not flagged with the category "Customer", and then re-importing the filtered
data back into a shared Contacts folder on one of our machines. This is a
very imperfect solution that will no doubt result in stale data. However, it
is the only solution at this point that least inconveniences our userbase,
which is one of our concerns.

I hope that a more elegant solution to our problem can be found.

Any thoughts?

I apologize for the length of the post, as I was hoping to fully explain
what we need, and what we can and cannot do at this point.

Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

Please ignore this posting. It seems the posting I made yesterday on
EggheadCafe, which does not yet have any replies when I look there, somehow
made it onto this forum, and has a reply.

How peculiar.

Sorry for the double posting, though I had no idea my first posting would
show up here.

"Sean" wrote in message
...

Please ignore this posting. It seems the posting I made yesterday on
EggheadCafe, which does not yet have any replies when I look there, somehow
made it onto this forum, and has a reply.

How peculiar.

Sorry for the double posting, though I had no idea my first posting would
show up here.

EggHead Cafe misrepresents itself as an original posting site. It just scarfs
these newsgroups and adds no value of its own.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]