The Global address book (GAB) can help you in understanding the relationships of people and organizations associated within the company. For example, you may have a customer who is also a lead in a marketing campaign, or you could have employees who are also listed as customers.

There are two ways that you can enter records in the GAB. When first entering a record for a person or organization, you may not know how they will be interacting with the company or you may know that they will apply more than one entity. When this is the case, you can create a record in the GAB and enter the entity later. If you do know the entity that the person or organization will be, such as a customer or competitor, you can create a record in the corresponding form. When you do this, a record will automatically be created in the GAB.

You can also use the GAB to create virtual companies. Whereas one GAB shared by all companies lets you track every entity associated with a company in one location, sometimes sharing data between different lines of business is not allowed due to industry regulations. When this occurs, you can create a virtual company and store the records in a "new" GAB. With virtual companies created, you can set permissions for users so that different virtual companies can only be seen by certain users. For more information about how to create a virtual company, see Create virtual companies for global address books.