About Setting the Resolution Order for Address Lists in Outlook
| About Setting the Resolution Order for Address Lists in Outlook |
For each profile, Microsoft Office Outlook supports multiple address lists and users can manually specify the order of address lists by which recipients in e-mail messages and attendees in meeting requests are resolved. For example, you can set the resolution order so that names are resolved first against your Outlook Address Book, and then against the Global Address List. On a computer, a user can open the Address Book, click Tools and then Options to specify this resolution order. However, in a corporate environment, it is more efficient for IT administrators to programmatically set the order of address lists by which names are resolved. Such code can be used as part of a startup automation script that an administrator deploys inside the corporation.
MAPI supports the SetSearchPath method in the IAddrBook interface, which allows you to set a new search path in the profile that is used for name resolution. To use the IAddrBook::SetSearchPath method, you must specify the desired resolution order by using an array that holds containers of the relevant address books in the order they should be resolved. Each entry in that array should also contain the entry ID of the corresponding address book.
The following are code examples of how to specify a custom search path for address lists.