what's an effective way to use nicknames in outlook?

Question

In my organization there are two people with the same name. One is a VP that is on the other side of the country and I never need to talk to. The other is someone I need to talk to daily.

How can I set up a DL or nickname so that I can type a short version of this person's name and have Outlook recognize that I want to send to that person? I'm very frustrated with Outlook here. Gmail seems to be able to sort it's autocomplete by most-often-sent.

I tried making a distribution list, but it's very inconsistent. I have a DL called '=OOO' and that one works fine, I type in =OOO in To: and it understands that I want to use the DL. But if I use a DL called '=mike' and type that into the To: field, Outlook has no idea what I want. Is Outlook impossibly bad at this and I'm going to have to find the right name every time from the list of people named 'Mike'?

Answer 1

Outlook supports multiple address books, and can look at them in a specific order, but the UI is well hidden. In Outlook 2007, choose Tools=> Address Book=> Tools=> Options...

If you just want your personal contacts list to overrule the global address list, move "Contacts" to the top of the list. If you aren't using a global address list, you'll need to create an additional contacts folder, put your high priority contacts in it, and move it to the top of the list.

Answer 2

I have a solution for using nicknames on an email but it only applies to a single user of Outlook and not for the entire company.

1. I added the contact to my personal contacts
2. Open the contact details and added a second email address
3. I entered the same email address from the primary email for the secondary email.
4. I entered the nickname in the "Display As" field.

I can now create a new email just by typing the nickname.