Email Distribution Groups in SharePoint

Question

A client would like a column in a list which essentially contains a number of email addresses for users and distribution lists within his corporate network. It would be something akin to the People Picker but that cannot be used as it does not surface distribution groups. What we actually need is to display the current user's Outlook Address Book (Global Address List) instead of the People Picker. Obviously they could manually enter email addresses for these people/groups but this would take much longer.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

One option you have is to filter the results of the people picker to only those users with email addresses, this might help get the results closer to that of the GAL, but this would apply to the entire site collection, not just the list that is being customized.

Answer 2

If you have development knowledge, I've written a control that inherits from PeopleEditor (the People Picker) to add extra functionality. It's currently designed to run a query against people in Active Directory, but with the correct AD query this could be adapted to distribution lists. I've also tried to document it as much as possible so others can pick it up.

It's currently in beta and located here.

Answer 3

• Create a contacts list from SharePoint list template.
• Synchronize this list to connect with outlook.
• Now you have the contacts list(Say SPCONTACTLIST) in your outlook.
• Now just copy your Outlook Contacts List (FROM GAL) to the SPCONTACTLIST in outlook. this will reflect back to contacts list in SharePoint...

you can try anything on these lines...