Address Book User's Guide

Marc Baber

Copyright (c) 2003 The Bot Works, Inc.

Basic Features

Bot Works' Address Book is a solid, basic tool for computer-facilitated communication. More than just an e-mail list maintenance tool, the Address Book stores your contacts' postal addresses, phone numbers (including home, work, fax, cell, and pager) web home pages, and other useful contact details.

Figure 1: The Bot Works "Bolodex" screen provides quick at-a-glance contact info for 1-to-1 phone, e-mail or mailing

You can use your address book like a Rolodex-- one big set of people indexed alphabetically or, if you wish, organize your contacts into any number of lists for various purposes.

You can create many lists relating to different circles in your life. For example, you might make lists for:

• Colleagues at work
• Prospective future clients or employers
• People who have agreed to serve as job references
• Family members and relatives
• Your children's teachers
• Your family's doctors and other health practitioners
• People you like to invite over for parties
• Your Holiday greeting card list
• People working on a political campaign with you
• People you send internet jokes or news to

You can add and delete people from your lists at any time, but you only have to enter their contact info once. Adding a person to a second, third or fourth list is a simple drop-down selection. Deleting someone from a list is a simple checkbox.

Whenever someone moves or gets a new phone or e-mail address, you can update their contact info in one place and see the new information in every list they are included in automatically. Later, we'll discuss ways to let people in your lists update their own contact information so you'll see their new contact info in your lists immediately without having to type anything yourself!

Once you've created a list of people, you can:

Figure 2: The Bot Works "List Manager" screen provides a single place to send e-mails to groups, maintain list membership or even print postal mailing labels.

• Send e-mail to the full list as a group
• Print out mailing labels either directly from an HTML page onto paper or through MS Word onto Avery labels
• View a complete alphabetical listing of all contact information for members of the group (useful as a phone list for example)
• Keep notes about your contacts and save a date-of-next contact as a reminder to yourself.
• View a contact information listing ordered by date-of-next-contact.

The Web Lets Your Address Book be Self-Updating!

This is all rather useful, but so far nothing that couldn't be done with a good desktop program. Why does Bot Works provide this as a web-base service? Because it gets even more interesting when more people are involved.

You can invite people in your address book to log in to the Bot Works as users. When a person in the Address Book becomes a Bot Works user, they take control of their own on-line identity. After they've made their first update to their own contact information, you will no longer be able to change their contact information. When they update their own contact information, it automatically shows up in your lists that way. Voila! You now have a self-maintaining Address Book!

Shared Lists

But perhaps the best thing about Bot Works' web-based Address Book service is that you can optionally share your lists with other Address Book users. By default, your lists and items in your Address Book are only visible to you (and only e-mailable by you). The list-sharing feature is set up so that you can share a list with a list of people instead of with one individual at a time. This is because often you'll want to share a list with everyone in the list (such as the family members and relatives list).

Figure 3: The Bot Works "List Directory" screen shows complete contact info for everyone in the list plus easy methods to add, update or delete contact information. Links to a "tickle" file let you keep notes about your contacts and next-contact-dates.

Alternatively, you might have a large list such as attendees of a conference that you want to share with a smaller list such as the conference's organizers. In cases where you really only want to share a list with just one other person, you can always make a small list that includes just the individual you want to share the larger list with and call it "My Big List Users", for example.

When you share lists with others, all of the contact information in the list becomes visible to the people you share the list with-- both as a shared list on their own page of lists and in their Rolodex. They can add individuals from your list to their own lists if they wish. They can also send e-mail to your list.

Future features will provide you more precise control of list permissions which we plan to tailor to user requests as people gain experience with the system.

Using the Address Book

After you've logged in to your Bot Works account, you should see a line in your "Active Subscriptions" list for the Address Book application. Click on the "launch" button for the Address Book to get started.

Next, you'll see the Address Book User's "Jump Page"-- a page that lists all the different programs and data available in the Address Book and lets you "jump" into each with a single mouse click.

There are currently three programs that you can use:

Bolodex.pl: This program lets you "flip" through your Address Book in a manner similar to the popular Rolodex cards.

ListManager.pl: This program lets you manage your lists, create new lists, send e-mail to a list or make address labels. By clicking on one of the "Manage" buttons in the ListManager program, you can view all of the contact information for all the individuals in a given list, add or delete people, update contact info or even keep notes about your contacts by clicking on the "tickle" button.

ListMember.pl: Presents a list of all the lists that you are included in.

Many of the features of the Address Book are self-explanatory once you're actually in the web site, however if you have questions, please let us know. Our goal is to streamline the application to make it easy for almost everyone to understand and use. Your questions help us know where to focus our attention for improving the system.

Thank you!