Sharing an MS Outlook Address Book

I'm using MS Outlook 2003 on Windows XP Professional on a small networked system with 4 PC's. We wanted to share the Outlook Address Book among all the PC's so that when one user adds an address to the Address Book, then it is available to the other users. I moved the Address Book to a shared folder and this actually works well. Unfortunately, only one user and PC can be using Outlook at at any one time and this situation is becoming intolerable.

So my question is: is there any other or better way to share an Address Book among networked users so that all users could access the Address Book and be sending and receiving email at the same time ? Would Gmail or some other online mail service do this better?

Thanks for any comments or recommendations.

 

G'DAy Roger at CCCC,

These links may help you set this up.

Sharing Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Contacts
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/share.asp

and
Shared Address Books
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/groupcontacts.asp

More Tools and Utilities for Sharing Outlook Data
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/share_tools.asp

There may be other ways, but this should start you on the right path.

pcbugfixer