3E Consulting Private Limited
Describe Global Address Book features and their use cases
Updated: Jan 18, 2022
The global address book is a centralized repository for master data that must be stored for all internal and external persons and organizations that the company interacts with.
The data that is associated with party records includes the party's name, address, and contact information. Other details vary, depending on whether the party is a person or an organization.
Each party record is assigned to a party, and each party can be associated with one or more party roles in a company. Party roles include customer, prospect, worker, user, vendor, competitor, applicant, and contact.
For example, the organization party 3E Demo can be associated with the customer, business relation, and vendor roles in the Contoso 1 Company. It can also be associated with the vendor role in the Contoso 2 Company.
The following illustration shows how party records, party roles, locations, and transactions interact and relate to an address book.

Customer: Customers are the individuals or companies who purchase the goods or services produced by other companies or entities.
Prospect: A party that might provide a service or benefit to the company
Contact: A person, either inside or outside your organization, that you have created an entry for. In this entry, you can save information such as the person's street and email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, and webpage URLs.
Vendor: A party that supplies products to one or more legal entities in exchange for payments is a vendor.
Competitor – A person or organization that provides goods or services that are similar to the goods or services that your business provides.
Applicant – A person who makes a formal written or electronic request to work for or fill an open position in an organization.

Important:
Persons and organizations are the party types of the address book and not as a roles.