Smart way to organize your Address Book / Contacts
 

Here is the way I trained my 20 Blackberry users to arrange (or rearrange) their Contacts list (in Outlook):

(Keep in mind, all my users were T-Mobile Cell Phone users, and then were converted over to Blackberry - If you just want to organize your Address Book / Contacts on your Blackberry then skip to step #10).

1) Copy all of your Cell Phone contacts to your SIM card (we use T-Mobile)
2) Remove the SIM card from your Cell Phone and insert it into your Blackberry
3) Power on your Blackberry and let it detect all your SIM card properties (cell number, SIM ID number, etc)
4) Now open your Blackberry Address Book and open the "OPTIONS" menu from within that area
5) Select the option that allows you to open the SIM CARD Address Book
6) Once the SIM card Address Book is displayed, open the OPTIONS menu again, and select the option to COPY ALL TO ADDRESS BOOK
7) This will copy all your old Cell Phone Contacts in the Address Book on your Blackberry
8 ) Now, sync your Blackberry via the Desktop Manager - MAKE SURE YOU EDIT THE Desktop Manager SETTINGS SO YOUR BLACKBERRY CAN UPDATE YOUR EMAIL SYSTEM CONTACTS. In other words, (as an example, I use Exchange 2003) so I have my Desktop Manager setup so my Blackberry can add Contacts to my Outlook client, and vice versa
9) Now all your Cell Phone Contacts are in your Outlook Contacts list.
10) You now need to spend a good amount of time (depending how many Contacts you have) organizing your Contacts list from WITHIN YOUR EMAIL CLIENT - not from within your Blackberry.
11) Dont have multiple listing for the same person like "John's Home", "John's Cell" or "John's Email" - that defeats the organization features the Blackberry offers.
12) Create a NEW contact for John Smith - and then under that add John's Email, his home number and his cell number.
13) Do this for ALL your Contacts. Yes it will take time - but you will thank me later
14) In your Email Client - You MUST now go and DELETE all the John Cell and John Home listings. You dont need them anymore because the John Smith listing will have all that information anyway.
15) Once you have condensed all your contacts, you now need to resync your Blackberry again via your Desktop Manager
16) MAKE SURE YOUR Desktop Manager IS SETUP SO YOUR EMAIL CLIENT "WINS" OVER YOUR BLACKBERRY WHEN CONDUCTING A SYNC
17) Now when you connect your Blackberry to your Desktop Manager - it will ask you if you want to DELETE all the old Cell Phone type of Contacts and also do you want to ADD all your new Contacts - say YES

...and viola - you now have:

1) Your old Cell Phone contacts in your Blackberry
2) You now have condensed and organized your email Contacts list
3) Your Blackberry will now give you the option to EMAIL, CALL HOME or CALL MOBILE when you select John Smith in your Address Book.

What more can you ask for...

I hope this helps!

Mayor111

While this is excellent advice for users wishing to populate their BB address book from their SIM address book correctly combining multiple entries, there is another feature of outlook that I would recommend doing at the same time. Outlook allows adding multiple categories to a contact. While consolidating the multiple entries into one outlook/BB contact, add one or more appropriate category to each contact. That way you can use a filter to limit the contacts when searching or using the auto match feature of the BB address book.

Hope this helps.
Rcbjr

Hey Thanks - that is something I didnt know was available in Outlook. You learn something new everyday!

Mayor111