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Twisting Portable Installation

As Open Contacts was designed to be portable since day 1, it is not compulsory to use a proxy program. You may, however, use an existing installation on your PC to make a portable installation:

1. Copy YourPC\Program Files\OpenContacts with all program files to a directory for example "OpenContacts" in the portable storage.
2. Go to the working directory, select all contents, and copy/paste them to the "OpenContacts" directory. Open Contacts will eventually use the program directory in the portable storage as working directory.
3. In Main.INI located in the portable storage, make sure the value of field Database contains no absolute file path and value of DisableCOM is 1.

[General]
...
Database=mydata.GDB
DemoDatabase=demo.gdb
DisableCOM=1

By default, Open Contacts will provide COM interfaces for other applications such as Google Desktop Open Contacts Plug-in to call. However, you might not want your program interacting with other programs of the host computer, so it is better to tell Open Contacts not to publish COM interfaces in advance. To do so, make sure in the INI file "DisableCOM=1". Without providing COM service, the memory footprint of the program will use around 300KB less.

With option DisableCOM on, Open Contacts will not write permanent data to Windows Registry.

To find out more about portable applications, please visit www.portableapps.com. In particular, Open Contact can interact well with Portable Thunderbird.

In addition, if you don't want to run through these manual steps, you may download Portable OC Creator which will make a portable version of your locally installed Open Contacts. This program basically analyzes the shortcut through which you use launch locally installed Open Contacts in order to locate the program directory and the working directory, then copy the files of both directories to the destination directory with properly re-organized sub-directories.