In the previous session I walked you through the picture viewer in Longhorn and gave a blow by blow account of the tools found in the picture viewer.

   Today we will explore a new feature found in Longhorn that is a part of our daily life but never used properly because of the lack of flexibility it provides now a days. This new feature in Longhorn is called “Contacts”. Well what is so special about the “Contacts” and why should we concentrate on something that we use daily and save it in different repositories like our digital diaries, outlook address book, web mail address books etc., the list is exhaustive. Well if you see carefully how the user uses manages his contacts today you will see that each person has a list of contacts in different repositories but they are not organized or they are duplicated in different places and tracking down a particular contact can be difficult if the particular repository where the contact’s information resides is not available at the moment the user wants that. That makes the user’s task of communicating to the contact difficult due to the absence of the contact’s information.

   Longhorn aims to eliminate that difficulty by making it easier for users to communicate and collaborate with other people. To do this, "Longhorn" includes storage features, such as the contact explorer and communication history, and a set of communication and collaboration features.

   With these features, users can:

  The "Longhorn" user experience for contacts consists of the following UI elements:

  Let us explore these features in detail one by one.

   The Contacts Explorer.

   The Contacts Explorer, is the place where users can access information of their saved contacts (including groups and organizations). It contains all contact information from multiple sources that have synchronized their data to it, and provides users with a single view of their contacts. Figure 2 shows a view of the Contacts Explorer. Note that this explorer is the same as that explorer for files seen earlier except that the details are that of contacts instead of files. Users can search, view, and manage saved contacts from the contacts explorer. They can perform actions against a selected contact by right-clicking the contact itself or by making use of commands available in the preview pane.

   Let me explain what this synchronization means. If you see the figure of the Contacts Explorer below, you will ponder how so much information was entered within a short while. Well, actually this information was never entered by hand but imported and synchronized from the list of my contacts in MSN Messenger. The moment, I signed to MSN Messenger, the list of contacts in MSN Messenger got exported to my list of Contacts and synchronized with it so that I can use this existing list of contacts without having the need to rely on the list of contacts in MSN Messenger.

  Let us explore this Contacts Explorer and see what tools are available to enable working with the contact better.

  Opening the Contacts folder by clicking on the menu Contacts in the Start menu displays the Contacts Explorer as seen in Figure 2. On examining the window closely it is seen that it displays “17 items in this folder” and 2 tools are provided. The tools are “Add a Contact” and “Import Contacts”. At the top of this the familiar Explorer menu and the common set of tools are found. The icons at the top are “Delete a contact”, “Search for a Contact”, “Show folders”, “Customize the view of the Contacts folder”, “Adjust the magnification of zoom” and “View Details”.

  Let us click on “Add a Contact” and see what happens and what details can be captured when adding a new contact.

  Clicking on “Add a Contact” in the header bar displays the name “New Person” as seen in Figure 4. Now we can right click on that contact and select Properties to update the details for that contact.Right clicking on the highlighted contact reveals the menu as seen in Figure 5.

  Clicking the Properties menu will display the window as seen below.

  Note that the details of the contact is well organized much like in an address book we see now a days. The contact’s information is in the first row, the organization information in the second row and the group information in the last row.

  Exploring the contact’s information will reveal that details like name, email, address, phone, and instant messenger address can be saved and the blue links indicate that the details can be edited by clicking on that. Let us click on the link “add another name” and see what happens.

  Wow a pop up window came where the details can be entered directly. Doesn’t this look like if an application has been installed on Longhorn to enable adding of contacts.

  Entering the details in the text boxes and then clicking on Done saves the details. Doing the same for Email, Address, Phone, IM is shown in Figure 8.

  Finally clicking on OK will save the details and switch back to the contacts folder. Remember in an earlier preview, I mentioned that Longhorn provides the bread crumb bar so that the user can know where exactly he is working. On viewing the bread crumb bar in Figure 8, we see that the user is working on “New Person” in “Details of Contacts”.

  Finally the view of the saved contact is seen in Figure 9.

  This concludes the introduction of the “Contacts” and we have explored a lot about “Contacts” today and saw how contacts can be synchronized from an external repository, how contacts are added and viewed. In the next topic we will continue to explore the “Contacts” folder in detail.

   Disclaimer.

   "Since the Longhorn version is in a very early stage of development there is no guarantee that the features explained will be there in the final version and is subject to change. This article should be taken only for getting a general idea of what is going to be available in Longhorn and not the actual features that will be a part of the final release of Longhorn"