Sending Contacts over the Internet

As the administrator of our dogfood server here at Microsoft, I get a lot of questions that aren't neccessarily related to the health of the server.

One of the questions I got this morning was: "How come I can't send contacts over the Internet?". So naturally I tried it. I draged a contact into an email message and sent it in mail to someone inside our domain. Works great! Then I sent it to someone outside the domain (ie my home email). Ugh. The contact comes through as a mail message, not a contact.

So I figured out that you can use V-Cards to do this. Simply go to the contact you want to send and click Actions and then click on Forward as VCard. A new message opens with the .vcf attached, ready to send.

Additionally, if you like this VCard you can attach your own VCard to each mail message you send by adding it to your signature. To do this simply

1. In Outlook, go to Tools, Options and on the Mail Format tab, click on the Signatures button


2. Click on Edit for your default signature and in the bottom half of of this window, choose to make a VCard from a contact, simply select the contact and choose ok!

Sending contact information over the internet is as easy as that.