Contacting a user

In order to contact a user, you first have to locate the user’s contact details in the personal info page. Depending on where you think you could find the user, you could open your ad­dress book via  GoTo    Address Book  in the top menu or open the members’ page of a work­space by click­ing the  icon next to the workspace name. If you don’t find the user this way, you could conduct a search selecting  File    Search    For Users  in the top menu. In any case, you will be presented with a folder listing of user entries. Entries of the form

user-name (full-name[, organization])

indicate that detailed personal information including contact details may be available, while entries of the form

user-name <email-address>

indicate that no personal information has been made available.

In order to get more information about a particular user and eventually get in contact with this user, you could do one of the following:

•      Click a user name to display the associated personal info page, which contains the in­formation entered by this user into the personal profile. The section ‘Contact details’ in the personal info page (if present) lists the contact facilities that the particular user offers.
Under ‘Communication’ the computer conferencing systems are listed that the user has installed. The presence of a  button indicates that this is a system that you also use. Click the button to have BSCW start the corresponding computer confer­encing pro­gram on your computer and set up a connection to the other user – provided that the user is currently running this computer conferencing program.       
Instant mes­saging systems that the user uses are listed along with system icon and user num­ber or user id. Click the system icons to get in touch with the user via the re­spec­tive instant messaging system.          
‘Directory services’ lists links to the services that the user has en­tered into the per­sonal profile along with a search key. Click the links to find out more about the user.

•      Choosing   Contact  in the user entry’s action menu serves the same purpose. The ‘Contact’ action form presents all of the communication details that the particular user has entered into the personal profile. Again, you may click  buttons to set up com­puter conferences, click instant messaging system icons to get in touch or click direc­tory system links to learn about more about the user, provided that the buttons or links are present in the action form.

Depending on the configuration of your BSCW server, you may send an email message or an SMS to a user by selecting   Send  or   Send SMS  in the action menu of a user entry. Send­ing an SMS is only possible if the user has entered a mobile phone number into the personal profile.

If you want to transfer a user entry to your local computer, e.g. for use as a contact in Out­look, you may store it as vCard file (*.vcf) choosing   vCard  in a user entry’s action menu.