Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2006 12:39:36 +0200 From: Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com> Subject: [GnomeMeeting-list] Common address book To: gnomemeeting-list gnome org Message-ID: <1143974376 2323 40 camel golgoth01> Content-Type: text/plain Hello, I have had private e-mail exchanges with one person who thinks that having a common address book shared by GNOME applications like Ekiga and Evolution is a bad idea, and that it would be better to have a separate address book for Ekiga and a separate one for Evolution. He also thinks that I am not following the advice of my users and that I impose my own view of the project without taking into account external ideas. (The same rant about the new name was mentioned again).So I would like to do a quick poll on the mailing list.Please choose a), b) or c) : a) I think that it is better to have a common address book for all applications if possible b) I think it is better that all applications have their own address book, I don't want my contacts to be shared between the different applications I am using c) I do not care. Thanks! -- _ Damien Sandras(o- //\ Ekiga Softphone: http://www.ekiga.org/v_/_ FOSDEM 2006 : http://www.fosdem.org/ SIP Phone : sip:dsandras ekiga net sip:600000 ekiga net
My vote is definitely for (a) as long as it doesn't require that those other applications actually be installed. I'm really looking forward to the Win32 port of Ekiga and I'm not sure what sorts of portability issues having a common addressbook brings up. On a related note, in my own opinion I see the personal addressbook as supplementary to a LDAP directory. The LDAP directory here where I work has over 140,000 contacts in it - all somehow related to the university (faculty, staff, students, alumni, contractors,...). But, the LDAP directory is read-only and populated centrally, so any of personal contacts that don't have a directory entry need to be stored locally one way or another. The search order
should also be such that the personal addressbook gets searched first and the LDAP directory gets searched second. That way irrelevant LDAP entries can be overriden by adding entries to the local addressbook. This also saves traffic hits on the LDAP directory; in the event the contact is first found locally a LDAP searchisn't necessary. My opinion applies not only to Ekiga but in general to any good communication app. I've
worked here for 14 years and found that a goodcontact lookup design can sometimes be the only difference between an app being limited to use by technical people and being used by the computer illiterate. Mozilla/Thunderbird is a good example. The technical staff here install and configure it on most of the faculty PCs and then leave it for the faculty to use. Many users here wouldn't use it if populating the To: field was any harder than starting to type the person's name and seeing it autocomplete or seeing a selection list appear that gets shorter and shorter as more characters are typed.
-Brian