Not much to say here, it's autocompletion... you start typing a few characters, surgeweb autocompletes and you pick the address by mouse or by keyboard.
Already added recipients can be removed by pressing the small cross.
The picker allows you at quickly select and add multiple recipients to your email. Press the To button, optionally filter by search criteria, and select the addresses you want to add.
Three different sets of contacts are currently selectable:
The contacts management page allows you to do various more detailed contacts management functions. This includes organising contacts into groups (aka distribution lists), manually add or remove contact information, edit contacts providing additional information.
The page contains 3 main panes:
Surgeweb conceptually works with a single list of contacts that gets sourced from one of several locations. Primarily your surgeweb personal contacts (see 5 below). However in addition there may be access to shared contacts, and any webmail contacts. These sources can be individually enabled using the appropriate tickboxes.
The source of individual contacts is displayed (see 6 above) as part of the list as per icon. Webmail contacts are always readonly in surgeweb. Shared contacts are readonly unless abook rules have been defined that specifically give you permission to edit the shared addressbook.
personal surgeweb contact (editable) | Server shared contact | webmail contact |
A good selection (see 7) of additional fields is available for adding detailed contact information. For most fields multiple fields can be defined and the "type" of each field is selectable (see 8) eg home, work, etc.
Webmail contacts are normally displayed as readonly entries in the surgeweb contacts. When a webmail contact is displayed in the details pane, links should be displayed (see 9) that allow just this contact or all webmail contacts to be imported into surgeweb. If all webmail contacts are imported the display of webmail contacts is disabled to avoid entries which are effectively duplication of the same information.
Outlook formatted contacts CSV files can be imported using the Import option in the "more Actions" menu.
Some features in the "more Actions" menu remain unimplemented for now. These will be implemented as soon as we can manage :-)
In addition to users own personal contacts, multiple shared addressbooks are available. These can be edited using the surgeweb contacts interface providing permission has been enabled to do so.
Permissions to view and edit shared addressbooks is defined using the abook domain settings in surgemail.ini. These abook entries can also be used to define additional shared addressbooks. By default surgeweb will try and serve a global and domain addressbook as part of a users contacts without the need for abook settings. These are the same format as the user's user.abk file and stored in:
surgemail/abook/Global.abk surgemail/abook/mydomain.com/Domain.abk
You do however, need to add abook settings for the Global and Domain addressbooks in order to edit these using the surgeweb interface.
Here are some possible example abook settings:
abook name="Global" read="*" write="surgeweb_admin" abook name="Domain" read="*" write="surgeweb_admin" abook name="Special" read="specials" write="special_admin" abook name="WideOpen" read="*" write="*"
The above settings allow:
Note: The above read and write group names are arbitrary and must be defined using g_access_groups.
Users' surgeweb personal contacts are stored in the user.abk file stored in the users' mailstore mdir folder. These are stored in a similar but extended version of the nwauth database files. In fact you could use an nwauth.txt or nwauth.add file directly as a starting point for a surgeweb addressbook - this is particularly useful for getting a shared addressbook started.
Alternatively use the "New contact in..." and "Copy contact..." under more actions menu to get started editing shared addressbooks.
Further additions of being able to talk to an LDAP addressbook, and possibly the current authentication database are planned in the near(ish) future.