Contact List Business Names

[tomparris]

The Contact List shows business names as <No Name> under the "All" tab and does not list them alphabetically in the other lists...

[tomparris]

Well its over two months later and no one else is bothered by this?

I thought Zimbra was a business application? Yet a business contact is listed as "no name"??

[phoenix]

Well, the usual reason for lack of response is that people haven't experienced the problem, you haven't given a complete description of the problem or lack of details about the version of ZD used and which server you're connected to or ..... there's lots of other reasons, none of them malicious.

Let's start with 'Business Contact', by that do you mean the Company name? If you do then it works for me. How about a screenshot of the problem and further details of what exactly is happening including version installed?

[daleclancy]

I am having the same problem. I have many contacts who just have a Company name and show up as <No Name>. I have a hard time believing that Zimbra would not have some fix for this, given how many business people have company contacts. I am running Zimbra Desktop 2.0 b10580 on both Windows XP 32-bit and Mac OS 10.6. I am connected to a Google Apps account.

Screenshot.jpg

[tkurth]

Hi, this looks like an import / copy problem from the Gmail account. I had the same problem with some names....

[anzola]

This is solved by writing the company name in either the first or last name fields. Good luck!

[adoland]

Having done this more than a few times over the last 30 years I've come to the conclusion that you really need to give some thought to how the contact list will be used and develop a scheme in the software to accomodate this. Zimbra offers multiple ways of indexing contacts, e.g.:
Zimbra File As = 1 Last First
Zimbra File As = 2 First Last
Zimbra File As = 3 Company
Zimbra File As = 4 Last First Company
Zimbra File As = 5 First Last Company
Zimbra File As = 6 Company Last First
Zimbra File As = 7 Company First Last
Play around with import / export and see what works for you.

[Perceptum]

@tomparris
You hit the nail on the head. If Zimbra is to be used as a business solution (or even at home), having "<No Name>" listed when there is a Company name is useless.

@adoland and @anzola
Yes, your solutions do work, but they would be impractical to implement in a business. This application needs to work with minimal user input.

A great solution would be for Zimbra to have some logic for showing the name of the contact. i.e.

1. If First and/or Last is available then show Last, First
2. If First and/or Last is not available then show Company

I am pretty sure this would satisfy almost all users.

[adoland]

Perceptum, good points you make. I think it's the case of whether you would prefer business rules or to let folks file things the way they want. After, the highways authorized by the 1954 Highway Act were begun to be used, trafific engineers looked at the speed the 80th percentile was driving and that became the speed limit. On the other hand, if 20% of the life guards at the beach decided they wanted to lay in the sand instead of be vigilant up in the chair, it might not be a successful business model. User choice is good.

Cheers, Al

[lschmidt]

@tomparris thanks for posting this problem. It's been annoying me for a long time and I finally decided to seek out an answer.

It seems that this problem is being brushed aside as trivial or as something that someone with lots of time on their hands can go experiment with importing. In my case, it's significant and I don't have time to play around with solutions. It's not a "bug" in the sense that it happens on occasion. It's simply that the program is defaulting to "bad behavior" rather than helpful behavior.

I imported over 4,000 contacts into Zimbra. These are a mix of individual contacts (with name, perhaps company, email, etc.) and a significant number (100s? I haven't counted) of contacts that are company-only contacts. In this latter group I have service providers (e.g., Comcast, Verizon, etc.) as well as restaurants (where I don't have a name, but I've collected the business card on the way out the door because it was a great experience), etc.

The first category of contacts ("individuals") show up just fine - they are sorted properly and display properly in the name listing column of the Address Book view. The second category show up as <No Name>. Since import/export methods tend to apply to the whole file and I have a mix of types, picking one import/export method or another is not going to help.

At present it seems that my only alternative is to click on each and every one of the 100s of company only contacts, "edit" the contact, and then select "company" from the "file as" drop down list, then "Save" the contact. This would take waaaay too long.

What I'm looking for is a simple rule (upon import and applied when any new contact is entered) that operates as follows: if the first name and last name of a contact are blank, display the company name. Outlook seems to have no trouble doing this, Thunderbird has no trouble doing this so why is it that Zimbra is so challenged to do this?