Address Book?

[Webb, Paul]

Hi all,

I have some suggestions for enhancements to the address book. Please 
feel free to laugh heartily at my suggestions.

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.

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)

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.

    * 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.

    * 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 <joe at somebody.tld>" -- 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:
          o Joe Somebody <joe at somebody.tld> would result in this data:
            First=Joe, Last=Somebody, Email=joe at somebody.tld
          o Somebody, Joe <joe at somebody.tld> would result in the comma
            delimited version of the above function, causing
            Last=Somebody, First=Joe, Email=joe at somebody.tld

    * 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
      "assp-whitelist at domain.tld" 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 kolab-addressbook at domain.tld 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.

    * 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.


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!

Thanks in advance!
-- 
Paul Webb
WebbEnabled Solutions, LLC
pwebb at webbenabled.com <mailto:pwebb at webbenabled.com> (PGP/GPG Encryption 
Capable)
http://www.webbenabled.com
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