Contacts Organizer Zimlet: 5 ways to organize your contacts

Power Zimlet #3

If you have 100s or even 1000s of contacts and perhaps also using multiple address books and want to organize them, this one is for you. With lot of contacts also comes organization or maintenance, syncing and other issues.  For example, say you want to move all your company’s contacts into one address book so you can share company’s address book to someone,  or,  say file all of them by “(Company) First Name Last Name” format so its easy to sort them and differentiate them,  you will immediately see there is no easy way to do that.

And that’s where this Zimlet come in. Its  a very powerful and flexible Zimlet and provides 5 different ways (& several combination) to help organize your contacts. It also organizes across multiple Address books (simply use ctrl -key or Shift-key to select multiple folders).

1. Move or Cleanup:
– Move all contacts with xyz domain  in ALL address book folders into xyz Addressbook.

For example,  say  you want to move all gmail contacts to folder called ‘gmail friends’.  Assuming you already have an addessbook folder by name ‘gmail friends’,  here is how you would do that:

STEPS:

1. Select “Contact’s email contains” menu,
2. Enter “gmail.com” in the next field
3. Select all the folders using Shift key or ctrl key  from “in folder(s): ” menu
4. Select ‘Move Contacts to:’ Radio button
5. Select the folder ‘gmail friends’
6. Press Organize

Other use cases:
–  Move some Contacts in ALL  Address Book to Trash

–  Move ALL  Contacts in Some Address Book to Trash

–  Move ALL  Contacts in ALL Address Book to Trash

2. Merge:

– Move all contacts  in multiple Address-books(say AB2, AB3 & AB4)  to a single address book(AB1)

3. “Sort and Store” aka “file-As”:

– Zimbra by default sorts contacts by last name but lot of people want to sort by Company and one of the way you can achieve this is by filing them as “(Company) Firstname Lastname” or “Company Lastname, FirstName” or “Company”

– You can use File-as Action to simply file all your contacts in a specific format for consistent appearance.

4. Tag:

– Tag all contacts that contains some domain(say zimbra.com) with some tag(say: zimbra folks)

5. Contacts with Phone number(for mobile sync): This is one of the special actions I added to help mobile users to move all the contacts that has phone number to one folder. Which in-turn makes it easier to make phone calls.
e.g. move all contacts with phone numbers to “has phone number” Address book. Now, sync it to mobile phone and you can be sure to know that the contacts in that folder has some phone number.

PS:
1. For more details and to download: Visit Gallery
2. Please make sure to to take backup of all your Address books  before using this (from Preferences > Address Book > Export)