The Evolution contact manager can handle all of the functions of an address book, phone book, or Rolodex. Of course, it's a lot easier to update Evolution than it is to change an actual paper book. Evolution also allows easy synchronization with hand-held and remote devices. Since Evolution supports most major network protocols, including LDAP, it can fit into almost any existing network. Another advantage of the Evolution address book is its integration with 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. Or, you can get an e-mail with contact information in it and create a new address card on the spot. In addition, searches and folders and all work in the same way they do in the other components, so you don't have to learn another system for similar tasks. This chapter will cover using the Evolution contact manager to organize any amount of contact information, share addresses over a network, and several ways to save time with everyday tasks. To learn about configuring the contact manager, see . To open up your address book, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar, or select one of your contacts folders from the folder bar. shows the Contact Manager in all its organizational glory. By default, the contact manager shows all your cards in alphabetical order, in a minicard format. You can select other views from the View menu, and adjust the width of the columns by clicking and dragging the grey column dividers.

Evolution Contact Manager Window

The toolbar for the address book is quite simple: Press New for a new contact. Find brings up an in-depth search window. Press Print to print one or more cards. Delete deletes a selected card. View All Displays all the address information in the folder. Use this button to refresh the display for a network folder, or to switch from viewing the results of a search and see the whole contents. Stop Stop loading contact data from the network. This button is only relevant if you are looking at contact information on a network. The rest of the contact manager is taken up by the display of your contact information. You can view that display as a table or as a list of cards— switch views in the View menu — and move through them alphabetically with the buttons and the scrollbar at the right of the window. Of course, if you have more than a few people listed, you'll want some way of finding them more quickly, which is why there's a search feature. Between Delete and View All is Quick Search. To use it, just type in one or more words you're looking for and hit Enter. Evolution will search through the contents of every displayed card to find one that matches. That means that you can refine searches by doing several in succession. If there are no matches, the card display will be blank. When you'd like to see all the cards again, press Show All. Tom comes back from lunch and finds a note on his keyboard: "Curtis in sales called for you, but he didn't leave a number, and I forgot to write down the name of the company he works for. He said it was important, though." Tom is not at all annoyed. He opens his contacts folder, and runs a quick search for "Curtis;" there are eighteen different people with that name in the file. He then enters "Sales," and Evolution narrows it down to the right Curtis. He only becomes annoyed when he discovers that the call was not actually important. If you prefer to perform a more complex search, press Find or choose ToolsSearch for Contact. This will open the in-depth search window, which lets you use multiple search criteria in the same way that email filters and vFolders do.. Click Add Criterion to increase the number of criteria you'd like to use in the search, and Remove Criterion to remove one from the bottom of the list. Your criteria may be a searchs within the Name or Email fields; alternately you can choose to search through all the fields with a regular expression. Then, you can select all the familiar requirements like Begins With and Does Not Contain, decide whether to match All or Any of your criteria, and press Search to set it all off. To delete a card, click on it once to select it, then press the Delete Card button. If you have multiple cards selected, you'll delete multiple cards. Adding or changing cards is slightly more complicated. Any time you add information to the contact manager, whether it's an old card you're editing or a new card you're just adding to your address book, you'll use the contact editor. To change a card that already exists, just double click it to open the contact editor window with all the current information already filled in. If you want to create a new one, clicking the New Card button will open up that same window, but with empty fields instead of full ones. Either way, it's the same tool for quite similar tasks, and you'll find that it's pretty flexible and can store quite a lot more than you'd think would fit onto a file card. The contact editor window has two tabs, General, for basic contact information, and Details, for a more specific description of the person. In addition, it contains a File menu, covered in , and a toolbar with three items: Save and Close, Print, and Delete. After that, however, it gets slightly more complicated, as you can see in .

Evolution Contact Editor

The General tab contains no less than seven sections, each with an icon: a face, for name and company; a telephone for phone numbers; an envelope for email address; a globe for web page address; a house for postal address; a file folder for contacts, and a briefcase for categories. You can guess what sort of information belongs in fields like Job Title and Web page address, but there are several parts of the window that are a little more interesting. Full Name The Full Name field has two major features: You can enter a name into the Full Name field, but you can also click the Full Name button to bring up a small dialog box with a few text boxes Title: Enter an honorific or select one from the menu. First: The person's first, or given, name. Middle: The middle name or initial, if any, goes here. Last: The last name (surname) belongs here. Suffix: Suffixes such as "Jr." or "III" can go here. The Full Name field also interacts with the File As box to help you organize your contacts. To see how it works, type a name in the Full Name field: Eva Lucianne Tester. You'll notice that the File As field also fills up, but in reverse: Tester, Eva. You can pick Eva Tester from the drop-down, or type in your own, such as Lucianne Tester, Eva. Don't enter something entirely different from the actual name, since you might forget that you've filed Eva's information under "F" for "Fictitious Helix Code Employee." Multiple Values for Fields If you click on the small arrow buttons next to the Primary Email field, you can also choose Email 2 and Email 3. Although the contact editor will only display one of those at any given time, Evolution will remember them all. The arrow buttons next to the telephone and postal address fields work in the same way. The last item in the General tab is the Categories organization tool. That's really its own topic; for information on that, read . The Details tab is, fortunately, much more simple: three sections, all of which are more or less obvious: the briefcase next to the details about the contact's professional life; the face next to the details about their personal life; the globe next to a big blank space you can use for anything and everything else you'd like to note about them. If you ever wanted to have that uncanny knack for remembering obscure details like the date of someone's anniversary (perhaps your own) this is the answer. 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. To learn about categories, read . Evolution offers two ways for you to organize your cards. The first way is to use folders; this works the same way that mail folders do. For more flexibility, you can also mark contacts as members of different categories. The simplest way to group address cards is to use folders. By default, cards start in the Contacts folder. If you've read then you already know that you can create a new folder by selecting File New Folder and that you can put new folders anywhere you like. Just like with mail, cards must be in a card folder, and no card can be in two places at once. If you want more flexibility, try . To put a card into a folder, just drag it there from the folder view. Remember that contact cards can only go in contact folders, just like mail can only go in mail folders, and calendars in calendar folders. 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, click the Categories button at the lower right. From the dialog box that appears, you can check as many or as few categories as you like. Then, you can refer to all the cards in that category by: Waiting for Evolution to support the operation. If you keep your cards on a network using an LDAP server, you can share access to them. Actually, the server software takes care of that, and also determines who is allowed to see and change them. 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 work-group or across the entire company. Ray wants to schedule a meeting with Company X, so he checks the network for the Company X address card so he knows whom to call there. Since his company also shares calendars, he then learns that his co-worker Deanna has already scheduled a meeting with Company X next Thursday. He can either go to the meeting himself or ask Deanna to discuss his concerns for him. Either way, he avoids scheduling an extra meeting with Company X. Of course, you don't want to share all of your cards— why overload the network with a list of babysitters, or tell everyone in the office you're talking to new job prospects? If you keep cards on your own computer, you can decide which items you want to make accessible to others. To learn how to set up your connection to an LDAP server, see . Once you have a connection, the network contacts folder or folders will appear inside the External Directories folder in the folder bar, and will work exactly like a local folder of cards, with the following exceptions: They are only available when you are connected to the network. If you use a laptop or have a modem connection, you may wish to copy or cache the network directory and then synchronize your copy with the networked version periodically. To prevent excess network traffic, Evolution will not normally load the contents of LDAP folders immediately upon opening. You must click Display All before LDAP folder cards will be loaded from the network. You can change this behavior in the Contact Preferences window. Your ability to view, change, add or delete contacts depends on the settings of the LDAP server. For example, you may read all the entries in the public Netcenter directory (available by default in the External Directories folder), but you may not change or delete any of them. The contact manager works with Evolution mail and the calendar to help you add new address cards quickly. However, it can also manage mailing lists. There are more tools planned, and when they arrive, they will be described in this section. As noted before, when you get information about a person 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 also 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. 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.