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. Evolution also allows easy synchronization with handheld and remote devices. Since Evolution supports most major network protocols, including LDAP, it's easy to use over an 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. The contact manager is illustrated in

Evolution Contact Manager Window

The contact manager interface is broken into two main parts. The first part is the contact display section. This can be found at the bottom right panel of Evolution. This section is where all your contact information is displayed. Each of these cards are organized into folders. The second section is the administrative section which spans the top of the Evolution window. This is where you can add, edit, or delete records. You can create a new card by pressing the New Card button, or by pressing KEYSYM. The Contact Editor window will appear. It has two tabs, General, for basic contact information, and Details, for a more specific description of the person. In addition, it contains a full menu bar with all the items from the main window (IS THIS TRUE? DESCRIBE MENUBAR AGAIN?) 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 house for postal address; a handshake for contacts; and a briefcase for categories. The things that go into most of the text fields should be obvious enough, so we'll just describe the more interesting parts of the window. Aside from the Categories feature, which is discussed in , there are two things you'll want to know about. Type "Eva Lucianne Tester" into the Full Name field. You'll notice that the File As field also fills up, but in a phone-book fashion: Tester, Lucianne. You can pick "Eva Tester" from the drop-down, or type in your own. I suggest that you don't enter something entirely different from the actual name, however. You might forget that you've filed Eva's information under "C" for "Code, Helix." The other little feature I want to mention involves the little squares next to several of the fields. Click on them and you'll get a menu of different labels; for the fields in the telephone section, it's a long list involving things like Home, Home 2, Other Fax, and Pager. Select from among them to determine which four telephone numbers to display at any given time. Of course, these connected times mean that people often have more than four telephone numbers. You can display only four in the editor, but Evolution can remember them all for you. When you click the little square button for the list of labels, any that you've already filled in will be marked.

Evolution Contact Editor

!-- Name: Enter the person's name here Business: Job Title: Home: --> 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 Sender from the menu. 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 move email messages: dragging and dropping works, as does right-clicking and choosing 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. Ray wants to schedule a meeting with someone at Company X, so he checks the network for the Company X address card that states his contacts there. Since his company also shares calendars, he then learns that his co-worker Deanna has already scheduled a meeting with them next Thursday. He can either go to the meeting himself or ask Deanna to discuss his concerns for him. Either way, I avoid 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 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.