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I've seen a lot of articles about integrating Outlook 2010 with Windows Live Messenger 2011. While this appears to be very easy, I'm running into a problem because the windows live IDs of my contacts are different from our exchange account IDs. For example, my contact is jsmith@mycompanyexchangeserver.com, but his live account is john.smith@live.com. When I try to "begin a conversation" from within Outlook 2010, Outlook tries to look for a "Windows Live" contact named jsmith@mycompanyexchangeserver.com which doesn't exist.

Is there any way to synchronize the two? Ideally I'd like to be able to "associate" jsmith@mycompanyexchangeserver.com with john.smith@live.com so that I can initiate an IM conversation from within Outlook.

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In the Contact details in Outlook, there is a field for IM Address. Use that for the Windows Live Messenger Live IDs.

It would be easier if you were all using Office Communicator 2007 or Lync 2010.

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I'll try that right now, thanks! And yes, my organization is working on deploying Office Communicator/Lync but it's nothing I have control over. We need a solution to use in the mean time ;-) – Pandincus Dec 14 '10 at 19:47
@Pandincus: Did it work? – paradroid Dec 14 '10 at 20:02
It does, but unfortunately it requires manually copying each person to my local contacts, and it requires that they first 'friend' me using their live account. This is to be expected, I just wish there was a magic solution ;-) Thank you! – Pandincus Dec 14 '10 at 20:36
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