Address Book Requirements

I. Introduction

This document identifies the basic requirements of an web-based multi-user address book application/service hybrid.

II. Vision Statement

An address book is very important to a collaborative site as it allows users to interact and maintain relationships with all manner of personal and professional contacts. Providing this on the web is ideal because it is available worldwide, 24/7, improving interaction across vast seperations in space and time.

III. System/Application Overview

Address book provides a simple UI for entering, editing, viewing, and deleting street addresses and other contact information including telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. It requires the street address storage offered by the places service. It also offers it's data model for storing contact information to other applications, such as intranet, who may wish to store such information in a portable format. The data model offers storage well-suited to PDA syncronization, particularly with the PalmOS platform.

IV. Use-cases and User-scenarios

A typical user of the address book would store contact information of his or her friends and family on the web. The user could then have ready access to the information from anywhere with IP connectivity. Also, the user could set permissions on his or her personal address book to allow other parties to view or modify its contents. Joe User might log on from home and add his aunt June's telephone number and address to his address book. Joe knows that his brother James will (again) forget June's telephone number if he doesn't allow James read permission on the contact. Then James will be able to log in at any time and read June's address, saving Joe and James both a lot of annoyance.

Also, address book may be used by other applications, such as intranet. In the course of working on a project, team members often need to keep track of the contact information of clients, suppliers, consultants, etc. An intranet project will be able to create and use its own address book.

The address book system's data model and any associated API may be leveraged as a service by other applications wishing to store contact information for any object in the database. A corporate intranet might use the address book data model to store contact information for all employees.

V. Related Links

• Coversheet
• Design document
• Places - Service providing storage of geographic locations that address book employs for street addresses

VI.A Requirements: Data Model

10.0 Contacts

10.05 Identification

contact_id (primary key) that is guaranteed to be unique to the local ACS site.

10.10 Basic Information

The following attributes should exist for each contact:
• Name
• Organization
• Department
• Title

10.20 Extended Information

A contact may contain arbitrary numbers of simple textual attributes of the following types:
• Email Addresses
• Telephone Numbers
• Notes

10.30 Street Addresses

A contact may contain arbitrary numbers of addresses.

20.0 Superset of PalmOS Address Book Functionality

VI.B Requirements: User Interface

30.0 Master listing

40.0 Management functionality

40.10 Single step creation

It must be possible to create a basic contact (with up to one phone number, email address, and street address), in a single form.

40.15 Single step editing

Basic information for a contact must be editable in one step (including at least one address, one email and one phone).

40.30 Permission Management

Default permissions for an instance of address book may be modified, as well as individual permissions for each contact.

40.40 Deletion

Contacts can be deleted.

VI.C Requirements: API

50.0 Provide association of a contact with an object

Each contact may be associated with one object, though one object may have many contacts.

60.0 Answer the question "What contacts are associated with object X?"

70.0 Answer the question "What object is associated with contact X?"

VII. Revision History