Tech Toys VContact SystemsbyRobert Fabian |
Every few years, I look to see if there is a "better" system to hold my contact information. This time, I looked at Corel's InfoCentral 7, Microsoft's Outlook 98, and a number of roll-your-own databases.
The information I keep is pretty basic. Who they are? Where do they work? How can they be reached (phone, fax, email, address)? And I want a space where I can keep notes. It averages a few hundred bytes per person. But I have information on 1,000+ contacts.
For me, any contact system must be non-demanding and provide portable information. It should reward faithful use, but not demand it. And it should be easy to move information to and from the system - my entire contact file should fit on a floppy and be in a standard format.
InfoCentral 7 is a really interesting system. It was available for free download from the Corel web site. InfoCentral takes an object oriented approach. For a business contact, a person object can be related to organization and event objects by various relationships.
InfoCentral comes with some 20 standard object types -- appointments, people, telephone calls, organizations, etc. You can add new types. Any relationship is possible between objects, e.g. a person could be linked to an organization as a "staff member", "Vice President", or "former CEO".
If you are consistent and faithful, InfoCentral will capture a mountain of useful information. My problem is that I am not sufficiently consistent or faithful to take advantage of InfoCentral's neat features. Interesting approach, but not for me.
I then looked at Microsoft Outlook. The full package is just too much. But it comes with a baby sibling called Outlook Express. This is a combination of email and integrated address book. The address book has a place to hold all the basic information that interests me.
But Outlook Express is a Microsoft program - it assumes that you will do things the Microsoft way. I want to work with the actual email message, not something dressed up to look good in a Microsoft viewer. And I want to see all the information about a person in a single window. Not my beverage of choice.
I did a roll-your-own database using Lotus Approach. It was okay. But I was not happy with what I could (easily) produce using Approach, or any of the other single-user database systems that I tried. It was possible to do almost everything, but the system had no pizazz.
I decided to stay with my slightly out of date SideKick 95. It uses semi-structured cards. Each card is divided into a fixed number of "lines" (variable length fields). My Contact cards have "lines" called: Lastname, Firstname, Phone, Company, etc. There is ample space for notes. Flexible import and export are supported. The icon was ugly, but not too hard to change.
The resulting system isn't fancy, but it is non-demanding and the information can be easily moved and transformed into different formats. It modestly meets my needs.
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