The Evolution contact manager can handle all of the functions of an address book, phone book, or Rolodex. Of course, Evolution allows easier updates than an actual paper book, and much easier synchronization with handheld and remote devices. And I doubt that you can take your little black book and make it accessible to the rest of your office over a network. Since Evolution supports most major network protocols, including IMAP and LDAP, it's easy to use over an existing network. Antother advantage of Evolution is that the address book is integrated into the rest of the application. That means that when you look for someone's address, you can also see a history of appointments with that person, and when you get an email with contact information in it, you can create a new address card very quickly. In addition, searches, folders, and vFolders all work in the same intuitive way they do in the other components, so you don't have to learn another system for similar tasks. This chaper will cover the usage of the Evolution contact manager, including organizing large amounts of contact data, sharing addresses over a network, and the automation capabilities of the address book. Contact manager configuration is addressed in . To start managing your contacts, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar. Describe the interface. Include the fact that the whole address book consists of a set of cards, organized into folders. You can create a new card by pressing the New Card button, or by pressing KEYSYM. The New Card window will appear. It has the following fields: Name: Enter the person's name here Address: Something Something You can choose which fields an address card has, and create new fields for cards. For example, Evolution provides for two line postal addresses by default, but you may have as many or as few lines to an address as you wish. To change which fields an address card has, choose DESCRIBE HERE HOW TO DO THIS You can add cards from within an email message or calendar appointment. While looking at an email, right-click on any email address or message, and choose Create Card for this Address or Create Card for this Senderfrom the menu that appears. While looking at a calendar appointment, right-click any email address, and choose Create Card for this Address. (NOTE that feature may change! unimplemented!) You delete a card by pressing the Delete Card button, or by dragging it into the trash folder. You can move cards around just as you would with email: dragging and dropping works, as does right-clicking and selecting Move from the menu that appears. Organizing your contact manager is a lot like organizing your mail. You can have folders and searches the same way you can with mail, but the contact manager does not allow vFolders. It does, however, allow each card to fall under several categories, and allow you to create your own categories. We'll go over categories in a bit. Another useful UNIMPLEMENTED Evolution feature is its ability to recognize when people live together. If two people in your contact manager share an address, and you change the address for one of them, Evolution will ask you if you wish to change the address for both of them, or just for one. Evolution lets you put cards into folders, mark them as members of different groups, and search through them in a variety of ways. This section will describe how to organize and find contact information using Evolution. CHANGE THIS paragraph: it needs a great deal of work. The simplest way to group address cards is to use folders. By default, cards start in the Contacts folder. You can create more folders inside that one, or create other address book folders as well. Each card must be in one and only one folder. To create a new folder, do this: To put a card into a folder, do this: The other way to group cards is to mark them as belonging to different categories. The difference between folders and categories is that folders contain cards, but category membership is a property of each card. That means that you can mark a card as being in several categories or no category at all. For example, I put my friend Matthew's card in the "Business" category, because he works with me, the "Friends" category, because he's also my friend, and the "Frequent" category, because I call him all the time and can never remember his phone number. To mark a card as belonging to a category, do this: Then, you can refer to all the cards in that category by: If the default categories don't suit you, you can add your own. Here's how: Cards can be shared over a network. This is the sort of feature you'll want to use if your company has a list of vendors and clients that needs constant updating. If you also share your calendars, people can avoid duplicating work and keep up to date on developments within their workgroup or across the entire company. I want to schedule a meeting with someone at Company X, but I'm not sure who to talk to there. Our corporate network has an address card that states our contacts there, so I know whom to call. Since we also share the calendars, I know that Deanna has already scheduled a meeting with them next Thursday, and I can either go to the meeting myself or ask Deanna to discuss my concerns for me. Either way, I avoid having to schedule yet another meeting with Company X, which is good since everybody hates their products and they're doomed to fail anyway. Of course, you don't want to share all of your cards— why overload the network with a list of babysitters, or tell everyone on your network you're talking to new job prospects? Evolution lets you decide which folders you want to make accessible to others. To begin sharing a folder of address cards, select (something) . The Sharing window will pop up. It contains: The Evolution contact manager can perform a wide variety of tasks for you. From speeding up basic tasks like adding a new address card to managing mailing lists, you'll find that the contact manager is more than a mere address book. When you get information in the mail or in a calendar entry, you can add it to an address card. To do so, right click on any email address or email message, and select Add Address Card from the menu that appears. Of course, Evolution adds cards from a hand-held device during HotSync operation. For more information about that, see . You already know that when you are writing an email, you can address it to one or more people, and that Evolution will fill in addresses from your contact manager's address cards if you let it. In addition to that, you can send email to everyone in a particular group by doing SOMETHING HERE. Future versions of Evolution will allow you to you export a group of cards to a spreadsheet, database, or word processor so you can print address labels or prepare large postal mailings. Need a map or directions? Click MapIt from within the contact manager, and Evolution will map the address for you online.