This article will explain how to create a contact group within a mailbox. You may wish to do this to act as a distribution list to both internal and external contacts. You can share these with other members of staff or if it's part of a shared mailbox, all shared mailbox members will have access to it.
This may be useful to you as you can include both internal and external recipients. Please note that contact groups can only accomodate 70-100 members total.
Creation of Contact Group in Outlook
Open Outlook and navigate to the 'people' tab.
Click on 'new contact group' in the top left.
You should now see the following window open. This is where you can add members to your contact group. Click on 'add members'. If the members are within the University select 'from address book' and enter their email address or username to find them within the global address book. If they are an external party click on 'new email contact'.
For adding an external contact, enter a display name and email address as in the example below. Leave everything else as default and click 'OK'.
Pictured below is how your contact group may look after doing this. Once you are happy with the membership of the group, click 'save & close' in the top left.
This contact group will now be accessible under 'my contacts' on the left. This example is called 'Contact Group Example' and in the example below you can see how it is presented. To send email to this contact group, click 'send email' just underneath the contact group name.
At this point the creation of your contact group is complete and you can send mail to it so that all recipient's receive the mail sent to it. If you need to make changes to the contact group (adding/removing members) you can do so by clicking the three dots under the contact group name and selecting 'edit contact' - this will open the same table as before so you can make changes.
Sharing Contact Group
To share a contact group, right click on the contact group and select 'forward contact' which will open an email containing the contact group as an attachment. Send the email to recipients and they will be able to save the contact group to their own Outlook. Please note that this does not dynamically update so any changes made to the group will not reflect on others unless the same change is made by them.
If the contact group is created within a shared mailbox any changes made will be visible to all members of the shared mailbox.