Shared Contacts with .Mac – The Mac Observer

On the surface, Address Book looks like an isolated contact manager - fine for individuals, but not so good as a shared system for a group of people. With a little help from .Mac, however, Address Book can become a useful group contact manager. Itis easy to share your Address Book contacts - the catch is that everyone using the shared Address Book database needs to have a .Mac account.

Hereis how to share your contacts:

Launch Address Book. If it isnit in your Dock, you can find it hiding in your Applications folder.
Choose Address Book > Preferences.
Select the Sharing tab.
Check Share your Address Book.

Enable contact sharing in Address Bookis preferences.

Click the Plus button and then select contacts from your Address Book to add to your shared list.

Select other .Mac members to share your contacts with.

If you want to allow the other users to edit your contacts, be sure to check Allow Editing.

Use Allow Editing so others can modify contacts.

Hereis how to subscribe to a shared Address Book:

While in Address Book, select File > Subscribe to Address Book.

Subscribing to a shared Address Book.

Enter the .Mac email address of the person sharing the contacts you want to subscribe to, and then click the OK button.

Enter the shareris .Mac email address.

Address Book and .Mac work together to make an easy tool for building a shared group contact manager, which is a vital tool for many businesses. As a bonus, Address Book sharing also duplicates your contacts on every Mac they are shared with - essentially an automated data backup system.