[Evolution] Re: contacts and mailmerge

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

Cc:ing evolution ximian com because I don't know all the answers...

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 18:23, Joep Blom wrote:
> Sir,
> I have now worked with evolution 1.4 for several weeks and thanks to
> your answers I start liking it more and more. It is one of the best
> programs I have encountered with respect to userfriendliness and ease of
> use. Of course you also wants more.  I therafore wonder if there is a
> possibility to use the contacts in the mailmerge facilities of for
> example OpenOffice Word (or it's Sun's version) of

I'm not sure what mailmerge is, I'm not overly familiar with OpenOffice
and the like beyond the simple stuff like writing simple text documents
(I'm not much of a "power user")

>  - using a network
> connection and samba - in word processing programs like MS Word, or WP
> or any other Windows wordprocessing program. (I think OO is too large
> and uses too much resources and is still too buggy). As I have never
> worked with the MS tools like outlook (brr!!) I don't know if they offer
> that facility which I think is very usefull.
> Another point is the format of the contacts. It would be nice if they
> could be accessed by some database routines to import in a database
> (e.g. mysql), or - even better - can be represented as a database table
> (mysql, postgres, db2, etc.).
> Of course I don't know if I ask too much.

Evolution's addressbook info is accessible via the
personal-addressbook-server which, in evolution 1.4, is part of the
'evolution-wombat' process. I believe it is accessible via CORBA.

In 1.5, the interfaces have improved a fair bit from what I understand
and so should be even easier to access? Hopefully Chris Toshok will get
back to you on this.

Anyways, having other applications be able to easily access Evolution's
addressbook and calendar data are one of the goals of 2.0.

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com