Address Book versus Contacts

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Think of the Address Book as a container of individual address books or address lists, such as the following:

• Contacts     The address book where you keep your personal addresses. In the Address Book dialog box, Contacts appear under Outlook Address Book. Contacts are stored in a .pst data file and support unicode (Unicode: A character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium. By using more than one byte to represent each character, Unicode enables almost all of the written languages in the world to be represented by using a single character set.).
• Personal Address Book     The predecessor to Contacts in earlier versions of Outlook that uses older technology and doesn't support unicode. The Personal Address Book is stored in a .pab data file.
• LDAP Internet directories     Think of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP): A protocol that provides access to Internet Directories.) as a White Pages for the Internet.
• Global Address List (GAL)     If your organization uses Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail accounts, the GAL displays names of people in your organization.
• Third-party address books.