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. The contact manager is illustrated in . 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 colums 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. The last feature is Quick Search; to use it, just type in the name of the person you're looking for and hit Enter. Evolution will search through all the cards to find one that matches. If there are no matches, the card display will be blank. To display all of your contacts, you can leave the Quick Search field blank, and press enter. The rest of the contact manager is taken up by the display of your cards. You can view it as a table or as a list of cards— switch between them in the View menu — and move through them alphabetically alphanumeric buttons and the scrollbar at the right of the window. 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 mutliple 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 full menu bar, which is still evolving rapidly.

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 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. Categories feature, which is discussed in , there are a few things you'll want to know about: the first of these is the Full Name button. You can enter a name into the Full Name field, or you can click the 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 (the surname, or family name), belongs here. Suffix: Suffixes such as "Jr." or "III" can go here. The Full Name field has one more trick up its sleeve: it 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, Lucianne. You can pick Eva Tester from the drop-down, or type in your own, such as Lucianne Tester, Eva. I suggest that you 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 Employees" The other 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. 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. Categories are discussed . 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. Note that each card must be in one and only one folder, unless you want to have duplicate cards. 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. A dialog box will pop up with check-boxes for different categories in it. You can select as many or as few categories as you like. Then, you can refer to all the cards in that category by: If the master list of categories don't suit you, you can add your own. Just enter the new category's name in the text box, then click Categories and choose Add to Master List in the window that appears. You can categorize contacts by typing the category names into the Categories field. You can also create new categories that way: just type in a category name, and it counts as a category. 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 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? Evolution lets you decide which folders you want to make accessible to others. To begin sharing a folder of address cards, wait until Evolution supports this feature. The most obvious contact manager tool is that it works with the mailer and the calendar to help you add new address cards quickly. However, it can also manage mailing lists and help you find directions between the locations of any two contacts. 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. Need a map or directions? Click MapIt from within the contact manager, and Evolution will map the address for you online.