In Merlin you can utilize contacts from Address Book, MS Entourage or LDAP server as resources for your projects. We have described in the past how this helps when working on multiple projects and require a pool with “master resources“.

The idea is simple. As a mac PM you probably already use Address Book or MS Entourage to manage your contacts, so why entering this data again and again for each and every one new project? You simply insert a contact from the library in your Merlin project and Merlin links to the contact of the source application. If you click on the icon or  displayed next to the name of the resource, the relevant application will be started and the person in Address Book will be displayed. As the resources are linked to the relevant data record, all modifications you make in the source application can reflect back in Merlin.

To refresh the contact information of inserted resources, just switch to the ‘Resources’ view, select the resource you want to update or simply select them all, right (or ctrl) click the selection and  select ‘Refresh address’ out of the shortcut menu (also known as contextual menu) shown.

That’s it.