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Hi all,<br>
<br>
I have some suggestions for enhancements to the address book. Please
feel free to laugh heartily at my suggestions. <br>
<br>
I love the idea of a common address book for all of my users, and I
love the fact that I can set up an LDAP lookup in their email client
(currently Thunderbird, but may become Outlook someday). But I'm
running into a few things that don't appear to be there that I'd love
to be considered for future versions of Kolab. <br>
<br>
I would very much appreciate the following enhancements/changes... and
it's possible they exist already and I just don't know about it yet. If
that's the case, let me know and I'll shut up! :o)<br>
<br>
Oh, and let me say this: PLEASE don't interpret any of these requests
as being anything but that -- requests. I *love* the Kolab project and
would love to see it get better, which is why I'm taking the time to
post these.
<ul>
<li>I'd love for the address book to have an "import" feature
available, so I can take the 300+ contacts we already have and import
them in. Yes, I know I can use sync-kolab and dump them into a shared
contact folder for everyone, but there's no current means to do an LDAP
lookup on the data in a shared IMAP folder, and we've found that
sync-kolab is just too experimental and unstable for use with 50+
users. For this reason, the address book becomes the means of choice.
And there's no nice way to import contacts in without going through
LDAP schema hell trying to get the schemas to match. We're trying to go
down that road now. So, an import function would be handy. Preferably
from something universal like a Comma Seperated Value file.<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>I'd love for a setting to be available in the kolab.conf file
and/or the GUI that would take advantage of the outbound SMTP services
to capture email addresses and then put them into the Kolab address
book (or, even better, a collected addresses address book!). For
instance, I sent an email today to someone that wasn't in the address
book, and so I typed it manually on the To line as "Joe Somebody
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:joe@somebody.tld"><joe@somebody.tld></a>" -- so, from that the address book would have
his first name, last name, and email address. And if it were smart, it
would look to see if there was a comma in the RFC 822 formatted email
address to determine whether the first "word" is the firstname or last
name. For example:</li>
<ul>
<li>Joe Somebody <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:joe@somebody.tld"><joe@somebody.tld></a> would result in this
data: First=Joe, Last=Somebody, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Email=joe@somebody.tld">Email=joe@somebody.tld</a></li>
<li>Somebody, Joe <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:joe@somebody.tld"><joe@somebody.tld></a> would result in the
comma delimited version of the above function, causing Last=Somebody,
First=Joe, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Email=joe@somebody.tld">Email=joe@somebody.tld</a><br>
<br>
</li>
</ul>
<li>In the past I've used a product called Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy to
manage UCE. One of the features of ASSP was the ability to whitelist or
blacklist someone via email. Emails to <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:assp-whitelist@domain.tld">"assp-whitelist@domain.tld"</a>
would whitelist an email address. assp-blacklist worked similarly, and
you get the idea. The same would be cool for the address book. Perhaps
something like emailing <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:kolab-addressbook@domain.tld">kolab-addressbook@domain.tld</a> with a person's
name and email address in the body would parse it and put it in the
address book (or a collected addresses book, as mentioned above). In
this way, users on the domain could contribute to the address book
without having web access to the admin interface and have to do it
manually.<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>As mentioned above, shared contact folders are nice, but
unsearchable and very limited in their application. It would be nice if
there was a way to make them LDAP searchable.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
Again, I love the kolab project and what it represents, so these are
just suggestions that I'd personally love to see implemented to make
the product better!<br>
<br>
Thanks in advance!<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<font color="#333385">Paul Webb<br>
Web</font><font color="#bbbbd6">b</font><font color="#333385">Enabled
Solutions, LLC<br>
<a href="mailto:pwebb@webbenabled.com">pwebb@webbenabled.com</a>
(PGP/GPG Encryption Capable)<br>
<a href="http://www.webbenabled.com">http://www.webbenabled.com</a></font>
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