Creating a custom WLM contact list

Work instruction
Creating a WLM Contact List

Introduction

WLM, although being a very good tool for communication, suffers when it comes to adding multiple contacts. In a corporate environment where everyone relies on WLM, it is not useful to have to add each person in your address book one by one in WLM. There is the import/export contacts feature. It is used for backing up your contacts and re-importing them, however still it does not take into account that you may need to create a new list from scratch and import it.

For those who are responsible for administering it, there’s a very simple way of creating a “template” for use when a new employee joins and/or a user loses all contacts. See below.

Creating a contact list from scratch

The WLM contact list is based on XML. That is a fantastic bonus, as it makes life easier when it comes to creating a list. For creating a list via notepad, open notepad and insert the following code:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>  
<messenger>  
<service name=”.NET Messenger Service”>  
<contactlist>  
<contact>contact1@domain.com</contact>  
<contact>contact2@domain.com</contact>  
<contact>contact3@domain.com</contact>

…

<contact>contact20@domain.com</contact>  
</contactlist>  
</service>  
</messenger>

You can see as above that it works with tags. You may enter your email addresses between the <contact> and </contact>. Make as many of these as you’d like depending on how many contacts you have. This is useful for a small amount of contacts, say for instance in a department.

Save this document as a .CTT – you will notice that the icon of the file is a messenger icon.

In WLM, go to the Contacts menu, and select Import Messenger contacts

Select the .CTT that you created, and agree to importing X amount of contacts.

You will then find a whole list of contacts! Once you have been accepted by your colleagues, you will be able to start chatting.

For creating a very large list, remove the entries “<contact>contact*@domain.com</contact>”.

Export your Outlook contact list

Select Export to file

Choose Excel 97-2003

Contacts (For best results, have your contacts organised so not to export people you don’t want in WLM)

Select a Location

Once this is done, please open the new .XLS file in Microsoft Excel

You can extract all email data, removing the names and leaving only the addresses. Then create a new Excel workbook. In column A have <contact>, column B have the address and column C have </contact>

Finally, copy/paste all of this data back into Notepad, and save it as a .CTT

This will create a contact list which you can import into messenger as stated above. In WLM, go to the Contacts menu, and select Import Messenger contacts

Select the .CTT that you created, and agree to importing X amount of contacts. You will then find a whole list of contacts! Once you have been accepted by your colleagues, you will be able to start chatting.