Just a very quick post to show how you can take contact records in any Notes database and make them available to users in the “To” mail dialogue.

Integrating custom applications in this way is not very well documented and I would imagine not officially supported. If you run a very large directory I would investigate the caching that goes on in more detail.

This post gives some clues and I don’t pretend to understand it fully.

Image:Making contacts in your Notes CRM database available as a directory

You seem to need just one view in your application – ($PeopleGroupsFlat)

Column 2 of   ($PeopleGroupsFlat) of this view corresponds to the column 2 in the dialogue.
Column 3 of ($PeopleGroupsFlat) contains the values that are pushed into the address bar when the wizard closes.

Now, because column 3 is a valid email address in my case everything will be fine when it comes to send – there is no further name resolution to be done.
However, if your column 3 was a name then I suspect you also need the $users view and the name pushed into the address field ( i.e. column 3 of ($PeopleGroupsFlat) must match with a value in column 1 of $users so that the address can be resolved at send time.

You also need to add your database to the Directory Assistance database. The directory name displayed in the dialogue above is the database title.

Image:Making contacts in your Notes CRM database available as a directory

Thanks to Jake for the demo address book