Contacts
Shared contact books with structured records, tags, notes, hierarchy, and access control.
Contacts manages shared address books for people, organizations, suppliers, customers, and other parties. Records can contain structured contact points, addresses, work and personal data, notes, tags, and hierarchy links.
Use Contacts
- Search across readable manual books when you know the person but not the owning book.
- Keep customer, supplier, team, or project contacts in separate books with their own access rules.
- Store emails, phone numbers, addresses, work data, personal data, and bank details as structured fields.
- Use tags for overlapping categories and notes for contact-specific context.
- Link members to a parent contact when the relationship is a durable hierarchy rather than a loose category.
The read-only system book projects contacts from the IPA directory. Manual books contain records created and maintained by Cloud users.
Understand the Contacts model
| Resource | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Contact book | Permission-scoped collection of manual contacts and book-specific tags |
| Contact | Structured record for a person, organization, or other party |
| Note and tag | Book-owned context for collaboration and filtering |
| Hierarchy | Parent and member links between contacts in the same manual book |
| System book | Read-only projection of contacts from the IPA directory |
Tags and hierarchy links stay within one manual book. Moving a contact to another book removes relationships that cannot cross that boundary.
How Contacts fits Cloud
Contacts owns records, hierarchy, import, export, and its application API. Cloud supplies identity and principals, resource access, resource-bound API keys, live application discovery, and shared Help and administration surfaces.
Cloud administrators see a book in the Contacts app only with an access grant. Administration → Contacts lists every book and lets administrators change its access.
Find detailed product help
Open Help inside Contacts for books, records, tags, hierarchy, import, export, and access management. Developers can read Resource authorization, Resource API keys, and App capabilities for the shared contracts Contacts adopts.
Automate Contacts from the terminal
The cld contacts CLI finds and changes contacts from scripts and terminal
workflows. A command that takes a contact accepts a contact ID such as
Ab12Cd, or <book>:<name> such as "Customers:Ada Lovelace", where the
book is an ID or exact name and the name is the contact's exact display name.
show --email <address> finds the one readable contact with that email
address. Book names and display names are not unique: when a name or email
matches several resources, the command fails and lists every candidate with
its path and ID instead of guessing.
cld contacts ls
cld contacts ls Customers --q ada --tag VIP --json
cld contacts show --email ada@example.org --json
cld contacts add "Customers:Ada Lovelace" --email work=ada@example.org
cld contacts set "Customers:Ada Lovelace" --job-title Mathematician
cld contacts mv "Customers:Ada Lovelace" Alumni
cld contacts import Customers --from contacts.vcf --dry-runBooks, tags, notes, and access grants are command groups: books add,
tags list, notes add, access grant. rm and the other delete commands
ask for confirmation in a terminal and need --yes in scripts. Every command
prints a stable JSON shape with --json.
Run cld contacts help for the full command set and
cld contacts <command> --help before a mutation or destructive operation.
Deployment requirements
See Deployment requirements for this app’s startup prerequisites, optional integrations, configuration and functional checks.
Compose from global search
An open contact with an email address contributes Compose email to NAME to the global search, including app-scoped searches. Selecting it opens Mail with a permission-checked recipient. Multiple addresses prompt a choice.
Actions in Cloud search
Use New contact in Cloud search to open the contact form and choose a writable address book. Within an address book, it is used as the destination. The selected contact exposes editing, moving to another writable book, and composing an email when an address is available.
Available keyboard shortcuts appear next to actions and in Layout Help.
Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K searches all accessible contacts. Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+N creates a contact in the current writable book, or asks for a book. E edits the selected contact outside input fields. Search actions update the open palette in place. Actions for the selected object appear before page actions.