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What is the best way to import all contacts from outlook public folder to a sharepoint contacts list?

We have about 3000 contacts and I understand going over 2000 items in a list hits performance. But the size is just about 100mb. Should this be a concern?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I found the easiest way to move/copy contacts over to a Sharepoint Contacts list.

  1. Navigate to the List in Sharepoint and click on "Connect to Outlook".

  2. Now you will have the contacts list show up in Outlook under your contacts tab.

  3. Find the folder in Public Folders where the contacts are stored and simply select all your contacts (ctrl+A), drag and drop them into the sharepoint contacts list.

  4. The time it takes to copy depends on the Number of Contacts. In my case it was roughly 5000 and it copied all in under 10 minutes.

But of course if you are looking at a whole lot of diverse data, as PirateEric mentions in his answer, you want to look at 3rd party tools to clean, export and import your data to Sharepoint.


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3000 items in a list is no problem. SharePoint supports up to 30,000,000. See SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits

Viewing more than 2000 at a time degradades performance.

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Thanks! That was my though too.However do you have any suggestions for the first part of the Question. –  user7400 Jun 6 '12 at 20:03

If you have a lot of data to migrate, you could look at third party tools to assist with moving data.

I just tried with a public contact list here, I selected all the users, copied them, pasted them into Excel and from there, you can massage any data, and upload it to a contacts list in datasheet view.

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