Google Apps Contacts – Add and View Contacts, Contacts Manager, Contacts Picker

About your contacts

You Google Apps account includes a Contacts Manager—an online address book. The contacts in Contacts Manager fall under one of the following two categories:

• Personal contacts: If you imported your personal contacts from Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes to Google Apps, you can use your Contacts Manager to access all of these contacts and add new contacts and contact groups. You can look up a contact to find email addresses and personal profile information, as well as quickly list all of the email conversations you’ve had with the contact.

• Shared corporate contacts: The email addresses of everyone in your organization, as well as outside contacts (such as vendors and suppliers) that your administrator added to Google Apps—similar to the Global Address List or Name and Address Book you used in Outlook or Notes. You can access these addresses in Contacts Manager by searching for them. You can also find these addresses when you compose and email message or schedule a meeting, using either auto-complete address entry or the contacts picker.

[advt]Note: Company mailing lists, called groups in Google Apps, aren’t included in the shared corporate contacts list. You can find a list of your organization’s groups in the Groups directory: At the top of your Gmail or other Google service window, click Groups. Then, on your “My groups” page, click Browse all groups. (available only if your Google Apps administrator has enabled user-managed groups for your domain.

Auto-complete address entry

Google Apps contacts manager knows the addresses of all your personal contacts, co-workers in your domain, mailing lists, vendors, suppliers, and so on. In addition, it automatically remembers email addresses of other people outside of your organization with whom you’ve corresponded. Therefore, when you start typing an address in an email message or meeting invitation, the addresses of personal contacts, employees, and anyone with whom you’ve corresponded automatically appear.

The contacts picker

The contacts picker lets you select any of your personal or corporate contacts when composing an email message. With the contacts picker, you can search for contacts using auto-complete address entry or by browsing the list.

View your personal contacts

1. Log in to Google Apps.
2. Click Contacts on the left or at the top of your window.
Your Contacts Manager appears.

Your default contact groups:

You’ll see your contacts organized into these three default groups. Click the group name to see the contacts it contains:

• My Contacts: Any contacts that you’ve imported or created in Contacts Manager.
• All Contacts: All the contacts in My Contacts, plus the email addresses of people you’ve corresponded with, either inside or outside your organization. To add one or more of these addresses to My Contacts, select them, and then click Move to My Contacts.
• Most Contacted: The 20 addresses you use most frequently. Gmail automatically updates this list for you.

You can create your own contact groups to organize your contacts and to quickly enter multiple email addresses in email messages and meeting invitations. See “Create Contact Groups.”

To view details about personal contacts:

In your My Contacts group, select the contact.

To view details about corporate contacts:

1. In the Search Contacts box, type part or all of the name of the contact. A list of possible matches appears.
2. Select the contact.

Add a personal contact

1. Open Contacts Manager.
2. Click the New Contact button in the upper-left corner of the contacts manager.
3. Enter your contact’s information in the fields. For additional fields, click More.
4. Click Save.

Note: Each time you reply or forward an email message, or move a message from the Spam folder to your Inbox, contacts manager adds the email addresses to the Suggested Contacts group in your Contacts Manager. [source]