[turba] Idea - Virtual Contact Lists

[Kevin Myer]

IMP has a Virtual Folder feature that allows you to save your search criteria,
with the results being the contents of the Virtual Folder.

We'd find it useful to have the same sort of feature in Turba and I wanted to
bounce this off the list to see if others would find it useful, and if so, I'd
add it as an enhancement request.

The way we handle lists is done in a number of ways:  1) user-defined contact
lists, and 2) organization-wide contact lists, with aliases and ACL's
controlled by Postfix and Sympa.  For small contact lists, #1 works good.  For
contact lists that we want to "officially" maintain (i.e. lists by building, or
by job title, or by department), #2 works good.  But lets say you wanted to
arbitrarily generate a contact list and didn't want to have to manually add all
the members to a contact list in your My Addressbook (and I didn't want to have
maintain one centrally, or allocate staff resources to do so).

You define a set of search criteria and addressbook(s) you want to find results
on.  You save the search and it becomes an alias that you can use in IMP and
Kronolith to send to (very similar to the way you save a Virtual Folder in the
IMP search screen).  You don't need to add anyone to the list, you don't need
to maintain the list, and you don't need to have someone else maintain the
list.  If you're using a combination of SQL and LDAP backends, you essentially
end up with a dynamic contact list.  An account is deleted?  Its gone from your
Virtual Contact List, because all you're really defining is a set of search
filters.

I think this would be tremendously useful, at least in our case.  It would allow
our users to use lists in three ways:  a small personal conctact list manually
maintained, a search defined contact list with arbitary values, or
organization-wide contact lists, centrally maintained.

Thoughts,

Kevin
-- 
Kevin M. Myer
Senior Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13  http://www.iu13.org