The Address Book provides a convenient place to store contact information for easy retrieval by programs such as Microsoft Outlook Express. It also features access to Internet directory services, which you can use to look up people and businesses on the Internet. You'll find that the following features help you organize all your contact information into the most usable form for you.
With your address book, you have a place to store e-mail addresses, home and work addresses, phone and fax numbers, digital IDs, conferencing information, instant messaging addresses, and personal information such as birthdays, anniversaries, and family members. You can also store individual and business Internet addresses, and link directly to them from your address book. For extra information that doesn't fit in these categories, there's a generous section for notes.
Directory services are powerful search tools that enable you to look up names and addresses on the Internet. The Address Book supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for using Internet directory services. You can use these services when addressing e-mail messages.
You can create groups of contacts to make it easy to send e-mail to a set of people, such as business associates, relatives, or sports friends. Any time you want to send e-mail to everyone in the group, just use the group name instead of entering each contact individually. Creating groups is also a good way to organize a large address book.
By creating an identity, each person who uses the Address Book can organize contacts into their own folders. If they want, they can put contacts into a Shared Contacts folder so that other identities can use them.
Moving forward with Outlook Express doesn't mean leaving your old address book information behind. You can import your personal address books from numerous popular e-mail programs including Microsoft Exchange, Eudora Light and Eudora Pro, Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Internet Mail for Windows 3.1, and any program that exports comma-separated values (CSV) text files, such as Microsoft Outlook.
You can also use your Address Book files with either Microsoft Exchange or any other program that imports files in CSV format.
Business cards are the new way to send contact information electronically. When you create a business card in the Address Book, your contact information is stored in vCard format, so it can be exchanged between different programs (such as e-mail, address books, and personal planners), and between different digital devices (such as desktop computers, laptops or portable computers, personal digital assistants, and telephony equipment).
Now you can print your address book to add to your personal planner. With three page styles to choose from, you can print all contact information, only business information, or only phone numbers, for any or all contacts.