Keeping one address book
Contacts is the shared address book — employees, customers and vendors in one place, held for the organisation rather than in each person’s own list. This is how to put something into it that the next person can also use.
When you have done this: A contact that exists once, is findable by the people who need it, and does not have to be re-typed from an email signature.
- 01
Look before you add
Search first, every time. The single thing that ruins a shared address book is the same customer existing five times with four phone numbers, and it happens one well-meant entry at a time.
- 02
Know which list you are in
All contacts, Favorites, Employees, Customers and Vendors are filters over one book, not five books. Employees come from the directory; adding a colleague by hand makes a second record of somebody the system already knows.
- 03
Add the contact
New contact. Type matters more than it looks: it is what puts the person in front of whoever is filtering to customers next week. Everything else can be filled in later by whoever learns it.
- 04
Put them in a group
New group, then add people to it. Groups are how a set of people gets addressed at once. Build them around what people are to you — a site, an account, a committee — rather than around a single mailing you are about to send.
- 05
Favourite the handful you actually use
Favorites is a personal shortcut over a shared book. It changes nothing for anybody else, which is exactly why it is safe to use freely.
- 06
Watch the birthdays list if that is your job
It is derived from the records rather than kept separately, so it is right whenever the records are and empty when they are not.
- 07
Export when something has to leave
Export contacts produces the file. Exporting is its own permission for a reason: an address book is the most portable thing a business owns.
What people get wrong
- Moving a contact between organisations keeps their history with them. Deleting and re-adding does not — and the history is usually the part somebody needed.