Question about Outlook Express

I signed into messenger today and wanted to add friends from my windows live contact list to my friends list.  In the past, I have followed the instructions at this link: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/messenger/get-started?T1=t2, and that has worked perfectly.  With the new web interface, however, all I get is a text entry box where I can input an email address.  How do I add friends from my contact list without typing them in one by one?

In general, I am using messenger to contact everyone in my work organization.  It is a long and painful process to add all 300 plus people to my friends list since I am limited to 20 per day.  Adding them to my email contacts was a simple matter of importing a .csv file, but there seems to be no easy way to make them all messenger contacts.  Messenger seems very ill suited for this purpose, but unfortunately I do not have any say over which tool we use in my organization.

I am using version 2011 (build 15.4.3555.308).  Let me know if you need any other info to troubleshoot.