204070 - Support for categories like in Outlook address book

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 75711

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[punkadiddle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030428
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030428

Contacts from Outlook can be display inside the mozilla address book.

When displaying a few hundred contacts this list becomes very difficult to find
associated contacts.
In Outlook I use categories to group the contacts. Each category is display as
expandable folder.

Could this be done likewise in mozilla?

In Mozilla I could use a number of address books insted of categories, but I
want to keep the flexibilty (and compatibility) of Outlook for contacts and
calendar.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:



Expected Results:  
Displaying categories as subfolders of the Outlook folder would be a greate
solution.

A simpler solution might be to enable categories for contacts, display them in
the  list and allow for sorting on category & company & lastname & firstname.

By the way: the customizeability of the Outlook views is really nifty.

Comment 1

[Tore Fahlstrom]

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

Comment 2

[Rolf Gloor]

The whole could be achieved either by creating categories like in MS Outlook (with multiple categories selectable) or by adding tags.

So one could group by tags (while, like in Outlook, one address could appear multiple times - when more than 1 tag / category is added).

Comment 3

[Rolf Gloor]

Have also a look at bug 75711.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75711

Comment 4

[Óvári]

Will the CATEGORIES property be implemented in the new address book?

The vCard format has the CATEGORIES property
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#Properties

Name	v2.1	v3.0	v4.0	Description	Example
CATEGORIES	Optional	Optional	Optional	A list of "tags" that can be used to describe the object represented by this vCard.	CATEGORIES:swimmer,biker

Would it make sense to have the CATEGORIES property in the new Thunderbird AddressBook core?

Who is developing the new Thunderbird AddressBook? Should they be cc'd to this ticket?

Thank you

Comment 5

[Óvári]

Should the CategoryManager add-on be incorporated into Thunderbird core?
https://addons.thunderbird.net/addon/categorymanager/

Comment 6

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

We dropped support for the outlook (express) address book, so this could be closed? Regarding the category field, this is tracked by bug 75711.

I currently have no plans to move my add-on into core, but I think when tags are coming, something similar will be implemented.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The user is asking for the capability outlook has

Comment 8

[IT Support]

We dropped support for the outlook (express) address book, ...

Hopefully not. We're currently working on getting the Outlook address book into a good shape, see bug 1679525, bug 1681824, bug 1682620, bug 1685166 and bug 1693154.

Comment 9

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

Correct, I must have mixed up something

Comment 10

[IT Support]

Outlook Express and WAB support was removed, bug 1687132. Both are dead or mostly dead. See that bug for details.