We recently worked with an Office365 client who had a ton of contacts. They wanted us to help them create contact lists in Office 365 for each ‘type’ of contact so that people could easily track down the person they were looking for.
The problem with this approach was that it would:
A) Create lots of lists of contacts in SharePoint (one for each type)
B) Leave it up to the user to determine which type of contact the person is prior to creating a new contact – which could lead to them choosing the wrong type and placing them in the wrong list, thus slowing down the collaboration process (isn’t that why you use SharePoint?)
Instead – we used one contact list in SharePoint Online and then added a custom column that included their three different types of contacts (vendor, client, contractor). We also modified the ‘new’ form so that the type would always be at the top.
We then created three views that filtered the contacts based on their type.
Then the client needed the ability to quickly upload the new contacts. The pages from their training manual on how to do this are below.
Choose Allow.
Choose Yes.
Go back to SharePoint list, then Click List. Then choose datasheet view.
Then change the contact type to the preferred contact type (vendor, contractor or client). It’s easiest to do this in datasheet view because you can make a bunch of changes at once.
Finally – you can modify what you are looking at by choosing ‘List’ and changing the view.
