Photos in Outlook Global Addresses?

April 26, 2007 1:17 PM

Can anyone direct me to an inexpensive (less than $5K) way to add photos to the Global Address contacts at my company?

We have +-1400 employees in 37 states/ three countries and we'd like to add everyone's photos to their Outlook data, just to get people a little more familiar with one another. The only tool we've looked at so far costs $150 a desktop, so that's a big fat "No." Our helpdesk guys are not that knowledgable in this area - or it's not really a priority.
Any ideas, smarty hive mind?

posted by pomegranate to technology (8 comments total)

To be sure this is a cosmetic purchase and can be hard to make a business case for, but it seems that if you do come up with one that $5000 isn't very much for a 1400 person company. Have you spoken to any of the tool makers to see if they can give a better quantity discount?

I'm not sure of your math, either, since $150x1400 is much more than $5000.
posted by rhizome at 2:16 PM on April 26, 2007

Yeah, that's why I'm not going with the original quote; I don't want to spend upwards of $200,000 for something that sits on each desktop. I have a hard time believing there isn't something that sits on the network for this.

(By the way, this is something the owner wants to do, so I'm just researching it. But it does have full business support if we can find the right tool.)
posted by pomegranate at 2:39 PM on April 26, 2007

Are you asking about how to take everybody's picture, how to get those pictures onto a computer, or how to add pictures to "global contacts?"
posted by designbot at 3:11 PM on April 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

How to add the pictures to the global contacts easily.
posted by pomegranate at 3:31 PM on April 26, 2007

Can users edit their own contacts?

If so, get each of them to do their own, and save back to the global database. Provide guidelines for acceptable pictures--this will let everyone choose their most flattering.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 3:50 PM on April 26, 2007

From the use of "Global Address" in the original question, I'm assuming this is a question about Microsoft Exchange. Exchange does not natively support the addition of graphics files to contacts, which is why a 3rd party solution is required. Editing one's own contact page is fine, but the graphics functionality is what costs money.
posted by rhizome at 4:01 PM on April 26, 2007

Why not just make an intranet site with everyones photo and save 5k?
posted by SirStan at 5:53 PM on April 26, 2007

There is no way to do this natively in Exchange, as was already pointed out.

However, I do believe that associating photos with entries in GAL is something that Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS, do not confuse with Windows SharePoint services) can do. You might want to look into that. The idea there is that every user gets a MySite, and one of the things on that MySite is their photograph. Then you auto-fill in the user's MySite into the wwwHomepage attribute on their AD object, and you are set.

That's the theory anyway. I have not tried it. But that's the way it works in my company -- I just don't know if they also made use of some other pieces that I am not aware of.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 7:58 AM on May 14, 2007