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Innovative and Handy Features
You might have ever been using many address book programs/functions since the
early days when you started using computers. Many people just use address book
functions of the Email programs like MS Outlook, Eudora and Netscape/Mozilla
etc, and some others could be using standalone address book programs. And, there are still a
lot of people using paper-base address books.
Some big questions to designing an address book program are:
- How many data fields are enough?
- If new way of communication like Skype is invented, how to record such info?
- How to interact with Windows applications?
- How to look up and search.
Open Contacts provides many innovative features, and the comprehensive combination of these features
is very handy for your daily data maintenance.
The innovative and dynamic user interface might be looking a bit strange
comparing with address book programs/functions you have ever seen. And a
5-minute learning curve might be needed along with the evaluation of the Demo
database. After playing with the demo database, you may continue to read the
rest of this article, which will inspire you for using the full power of Open
Contacts.
Unique features commonly used
1. Dynamic user interfaces:
Among all address book programs/functions you have ever evaluated, almost
all of them provide fixed data fields, somewhat with a fixed number of
custom fields. Apparently, such management leads to two sack backs:
a) Some data fields you want or you will want are not there. Custom
fields are not enough, and they are placed in insignificant corner of
the screen.
b) Some contacts have rich contact info, and some others might just have
a phone number or email address. While you could have different
attention to different contact methods of different people, fixed
locations of data fields could not prompt the significant info.
With Open Contacts, almost all data fields are dynamic and customizable.
And based on such dynamic and customizable data fields, you can design predefined data
fields and predefined sections to accommodate
frequently used data fields. Thus, the arrangements of data fields could
easily be tailored for you and by you.
Open Contacts shows only data fields with info you inputted, and you can change the
locations of data fields any time, so you could easily focus on those
significant contact info. There are always enough data fields for you to
input any kind of contact info..
2. Multi-level categories
Many address book programs/functions like MS Outlook and Eudora, support
definition of categories of each contact, however, from certain point of
view, the category is just a grouping, since there are no subcategories
could be defined. Open Contacts provides real category trees. Furthermore,
viewing contacts through subcategories recursively are supported. That is,
when you click on a category, contacts of the category will be listed, and
when you right-click on a category, contacts of the category and
subcategories will all be listed.
3. Dynamic grouping of initials
Many address book programs/functions provide tabs of A-Z, and even there
is no contact with a particular initial letter, the tab still appear. When
you click on such tab, of course there will no be contacts listed. Open
Contacts will show only existing initial letters.
4. Separation of person contacts and organizational contacts
In the past, such separation is only available in CRM programs. And Open
Contacts is an address book program with some CRM features.
As most existing address programs does not have concept of such separation,
after importing contacts from other data source, you
may convert some of them into organizational contacts.
Flexibilities for some divisions of users
- Open Contacts could import contact info from MS Outlook, Outlook
Express, Eudora, Netscape/Mozilla, and CSV. As MS Outlook and Eudora support
categories, when importing, Open Contacts could import the categories as
well.
- Some people want to list contacts of people by surname like “Smith, James”,
and filter the list by initial of surname rather than initial of full name.
Open Contacts could adapt such need as well.
- To share the database by multiple workstations, you could run the program
in client/server mode. There is no performance penalty for sharing the
database in LAN.
- The size of the backup copy of the database is generally around 1/10 of
the size of the database. So you can send the backup copy to your Webmail
account, and retrieve restore the backup copy on your company’s computer.
- The program is green enough for you to run the program and the data
on portable devices like a USB memory drive.
- To share some contacts with your friend, you may export selected contacts
into an XML file, and send the file via Email to your friends. Your friends
may then import the XML file into Open Contacts to add or update. Such XML file could be
considered as a super vCard.
- Most settings in the Options windows are stored in the address book
database. So when you move the database to another computer running Open
Contacts, the settings will apply.
As Open Contacts had provided such flexible platform for managing contact
info, you will find innovative ways of using this platform.
Reliability and Speed
Unlike most other top-end contact managers which use file base database
engines like xBase, FoxPro and Access etc, Open Contacts uses real database
server engine Firebird which provides solid database capabilities. You need no
worry about corrupted indexes and speed problems while using in LAN environment.
By default, Open Contacts use Firebird embedded installed implicitly. To share the database in LAN
environment, you just need to install Firebird on a host machine and copy the
database to the host, then redirect all Open Contacts instances to the database.
We have built a test database for stress tests with around
30,000 contacts, each of which has around 30
fields. The size of the database is about 260 MB. When the program run and list
all 30,000 contacts in the Contact List windows, the memory footprint for
listing 30,000 contacts is about 5 MB. It took only 4 seconds to load the
program and list contacts.
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