Creating contact groups in a public contacts folder

[jcaz]

I am using these:
Kopano version 1.3.156
Z-Push version 2.3.6

I am trying to create a location where employees of a company can share a set of contacts that will stay synchronized between their computers using Outlook and the Kopano extension.
I created a shared public folder and successfully moved some contacts into it from Outlook. I was then able to view them in the webapp, but not in Outlook on someone else’s computer apparently because of this bug.
Once I upgrade Z-Push that problem will hopefully be resolved, but the solution still is not complete because it appears as though I am unable to add contact groups to the public folder in Outlook. The company manages several large membership lists, and the groups are very important functionality for them. Is there a way I can make this work with the shared folder system? If not, is there a recommended alternative or a feature in development?
Thank you

[fbartels]

Hi @jcaz ,

distribution lists are unfortunately not part of the activesync protocol and are therefore disabled in Outlook. for future reference we have the ticket https://jira.kopano.io/browse/KOE-73 for this and are general in favor of working around this through koe, but up until now we did not find a practical way in doing so.

One possible workaround (at least when working inside of Outlook) that was suggested in a microsoft forum, when someone asked a similar question regarding hotmail is to use categories and then group contacts by categories. but that is imho not really an approachable solution.

[jcaz]

@fbartels Hi Felix,

Thank you for your quick response. I did read that the distribution lists were unsupported by standard ActiveSync, but I was unsure if that applied to the folders accessed through the Kopano extension. Thank you for clearing up my confusion.

I am going to give the categories a try, and if that doesn’t work I will explore synchronization methods external to Outlook.

Jared