Contact Server Super Slow or is it just me?

I just wanted to know if the slow performance of Contacts/Address Book and Contacts server (in Mountain Lion Server) is normal. Mind you I am coming from Marketcircle Daylite, but we're trying to leave it due to cost.

The communication between local Contact/Address Book apps on our office computers and the server just seem abnormally slow to the point of not being efficient to use. We're testing moving contacts from Daylite to Contacts server. Yikes even for barely over 100 contacts the import is slow, the updating on local computers slow. We have over nine thousand contacts.

Here's our setup:

MacMini Server / 2 GHz Intel Core i7/ 8GB Ram

Mountain Lion Server 10.8.2

Setup fake user "sharedcontacts" on server strictly for contacts

User computers all have access to same "sharedcontacts" account via username and password for "sharedcontacts" user account

LAN is gigabit ethernet, business class netgear switch connecting Mac Pros, iMacs, Mac Mini's - 12 computers total, only 5 computers connected to shared contacts.

Other things I don't get:

I can only import the contacts to the server side "sharedcontacts" user account using my local Contacts application. I don't know how to access the actual user contacts on the server itself since I can't open Contacts.app on the server and see them because they're not part of the local user admin account.

I'm not sure how to use/ why there's a directory header on the left side in my Contacts.app application. I can already see the shared contacts for "sharedcontacts" account. Then below is the directory header. Not sure what to do with that and if that could improve performance. Allowing the serach on directory is enabled on Contacts server.

How do I ensure that (for one computer - my boss's) the contacts stay on his computer even when he's disconnected from our local network? He needs these server-based contacts available all of the time.

Any insight would help.

Message was edited by: Tangier Clarke1