I asked this a few years ago and I there weren't any good options. I basically just want to push a group of contacts out to all of our BB's. We are on BES. This way one HR person can keep the employee list up to date and it would automatically sync with all of our users BB's. We currently maintain a public folder that users can copy into their contacts, but that is way too much maintanance for users to update.

You need a 3rd party product to do this.

any suggestions for those 3rd party apps? I haven't found any.

You could do something like this:

BlackBerry - BlackBerry | Wireless Handheld Devices, Software & Services from Research In Motion (RIM)

with the lookup feature from the handheld cant you just use that for the contact list? all they would need is part of a name.

The lookup feature is good for emails, but what if you need to call that person?

No problem.
The lookup feature returns all relevant contact information from the GAL.
Phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, title, etc.