I think the final piece of the puzzle was the Open Access List permission. It's quite possible that this was in place before I mucked about with the address lists and caused my problems. Nonetheless, after overcoming the mailbox permission fiasco, average users were still unable to use the Global Address List.
Well, my wife made a comment about the colors on the blog. It's not so much that her opinion carries more weight (actually, that is much of it), but the fact that she had visited. She probably hasn't read it for weeks. She says I talk to much about "geek stuff". So the fact that she actually came by, and then one of the first couple things she said had to do with the colors, made me decide to change them. Again.
I'm actually using the background colors that I used on the old design, though they look a bit lighter because of the lack of a really dark color (like in the header on the old site). I also tweaked the text colors a bit and changed the font style and size. Hopefully this combination will both be easier on the eye, and last a little while. I hate choosing colors. Not just here. I hate doing it at home too.
I think that the old site probably looked a bit, I don't know, stronger. But you never know. I'm still working on it, and maybe I'll get there one day. In the meantime, I think the new design is starting to give the old one a run for its money, and it's a lot less crowded to boot. Now I just have to fix everything that broke when I changed the size of the text.
Actually, I rather like Outlook Web Access (OWA). But sometimes I just don't get the folks at Microsoft. OWA is setup in such a way that you can store distribution lists (lists of email addresses) in a contacts folder. That part is okay. But if you happen to have a public folder that is designed for contacts, forget using a distribution list in it. Microsoft has apparently decided that that just isn't necessary. What's more is that you also can't access the public folder through the address list option when sending an email. So if you have distribution lists in public folders, better forget about using them with OWA. At least for now.
