Public Folder Contacts In Microsoft 365

A public folder is a feature within Microsoft Exchange, as its name "public" implies. It is designed for shared access and provides an easy and effective way to collect, organize, and share information with other resources in your workgroup or organization. Public folders help organize content in a hierarchy that's easy to browse. It gives Outlook users access to shared information (although it is not specifically designed to share and collaborate because it does not support versioning and other document management features). Based on rapid development of Microsoft 365, Microsoft wants to allow more and more people to migrate Microsoft 365 groups and shared mailboxes to Microsoft 365, as public folders have some rich features that makes users always look back.

Public folders support the following features:

Contacts, Calendar Items, Messages, Notes, Templates

If You are an entrepreneur who has few users and you have personal contacts that you want to share with your employees, you also want to create new contacts so that they can maintain a single directory of all contacts.

Before creating a public folder, you need to first create a public folder mailbox. The Public folder mailboxes contain hierarchical information and contents for public folders.

Login to the Office 365 admin portal

Click on “Exchange”

• Navigate the Public folders > Public folder mailboxes, and then click on +
• In the public folder mailbox, provide a name for the public folder mailbox.
• Click Save.

After creating a public folder mailbox, you can now create the public folder

• Click on Public folder, and then click +
• Provide a name of the Public folder
• Click Save.

Select the created public folder and click "Manage" to give full permission to yourself or another user, then save

You can also enable public folder email.

You may have to wait about 24 hours for a public folder to show up and start on Outlook

• Launch outlook 
• Click on the ellipse at the bottom of the left-hand navigation panel.
• Click the folder to go to the Outlook folder view
• Navigate to the public folder you created on the Exchange admin portal.
• Right click on the "Folder Helpdesk" on the public folder, click on the "New Folder"
• New folder name. In this example, the new folder name is called "Common Contacts".
• Choose "Contact Items" in the drop-down menu under Folder Tips.
• Select to keep the folder. In this example, the folder will be placed in the "Folder Helpdesk".
• Give the folder a name and make sure the "Folder Tips" option is "Contact Items", click OK
• Right click on the created Contacts folder, go to Properties to set some options
• Click on the "Outlook Address Book" tab and check the "Show this folder as an email address book" checkbox to find it in the address list so that it is detectable on the address book.
• Click the "Permissions" tab to set the permission

As you can see in the screenshot above, by "default" everyone has the "Author" permission that enables them to create contacts, "new contacts", and "self" edit contacts, they can "delete" "Will not be able to contact”.

You can encourage any user to "Owner" or create different permission levels as needed.

The public folder contact is ready for use, users can start creating contacts or you can copy / cut contacts from an existing personal contact to a public folder contact.

Basically most people are not aware that one can copy / cut contacts, you can use "Select All", Ctrl + X or Ctrl + C from your normal Ctrl + A as the case may be. And your public folder contacts may contain Ctrl + V

Ctrl + A on my contact item

A better option is to use the "Move" option in the context menu of the public folder contact