SharePoint Contactlist vs Exchange Contacts

Question

Should i store my company-wide contacts in a Exchange Shared Contacts list or in a SharePoint Contacts list?

For now I can come up with the following pro's of Exchange and SharePoint

Exchange:

• Great integration with Outlook
• Easy find e-mails linked to a contact in Outlook.

SharePoint

• The contactslist is available as lookup for other lists (e.g. current projects)
• Contacts available outside of Outlook

I'm using SharePoint 2007

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Sidenote

Is it me or is the integration SharePoint-Exchange really crap / non-existent? (SP lacking suppport for Calendars in Exchange and vv; lacking propper support for storing e-mails in a doclib, etc)

Answer 1

I like centralized storage in Sharepoint. It allows you and others to modify them and utilize them in various other applications within the site, purchasing, support requests, etc. It also allows you to leverage Sharepoint workflows for any sort of new client/contact onboarding processes. Contacts can be exported from Sharepoint.

Answer 2

We use Contacts & Calendars in SharePoint when they are shared by multiple people.

(These are imported back into Outlook through the Actions / Connect to Outlook function. These allow two way sync between users and SharePoint and work quite well.

In terms of email we use MacroView to allow easy dragging and dropping of content between Outlook and SharePoint, but I agree the out of the box integration is lacking, and is still lacking in SharePoint 2010.