An address book is an application that helps you manage your names, phone numbers, email addresses and so on. They are usually relatively simple and often integrated into larger office productivity products. You might relate an address book in Linux to a Rolodex. Also, address books tend to reside on an individual machine or workstation.

It's also possible to have an address book function in a larger CRM (Contact Resource Manager) system. These systems allow multiple users read and write access to names, phone numbers, email address and so on, with the data usually living on some type of database/server backend. People from all over your company would have access to the data contained in a CRM.

For the purposes of this article, we'll stick with the normal address book programs that would be available on a person's Linux desktop.

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