Chapter 3. The Evolution Contact Manager

Table of Contents
Getting Started With the Contact Manager
Destroy, Create, and Change: The Contact Editor
Organizing your Contact Manager
Sharing your Cards
Contact Manager Tools

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 devices. Since Evolution supports the LDAP directory protocol, you can use it with almost any type of existing directory server on your network.

Another advantage of the Evolution contact manager is its integration with the rest of the application. 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 work in the same way they do in the other components.

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 the section called Managing the Contact Manager in Chapter 8.

Getting Started With the Contact Manager

To open up your address book, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar, or select one of your contacts folders from the folder bar. Figure 3-1 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.

Figure 3-1. Evolution Contact Manager

The toolbar for the address book is quite simple:

Your contact information fills the rest of the display. By default, Evolution shows it as a set of small address cards, but you can set it to appear as a table with the options in the View menu. Move through the cards 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.

Searching for Contacts

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. In other words, 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.

Example 3-1. Refining a Quick Search

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 Tools->Search 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 search within the Name or Email fields; alternately you can choose to search through all the fields with a regular expression. Then, you can select from 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.