The address book software will automatically recognize possible duplicate contact information and display a dialog to the user that proposes a few ways how to deal with the data including options to skip or edit.

Important features offered by Open Contacts include:

• Unlimited data fields to store any contact info. Along with predefined fields, you may add unlimited data fields grouped by section.
• Manage relationships between individuals, organizations and departments.
• Comprehensive Categories. You may click on a category to view contacts of the category, or right click to list contacts of subcategories recursively.
• Search through any data field, and search birthday of people.
• Interact with Windows applications of telephony, Skype, emailing or Web/File browsing etc.
• Map service with Google Maps. You may use either single line address or multi-line address. Yahoo Maps and Microsoft Live Maps are also supported through custom action plug-in programs.
• Print contact info and labels on papers of different sizes.
• Import from MS Outlook, Outlook Express (WAB), Eudora, Netscape/Mozilla Thunderbird, XML (xCard), CSV, LDIF, Vista and vCard.
• Export to indented text, CSV, Excel, vCard, XML (xCard), HTML, hCard and XFN (XHTML Friends Network).
• Portable. You may bring your address book database and the program in an external device such as a USB flash disk, and run the program on any Windows PC.
• LAN supports for multiple users in Local Area Network, using true Client/Server architecture.

Quite a few can be very interesting for users in specific work situations. The only real downside to this excellent address book software program is the rather outdated user interface that feels slow in certain situations. Open Contacts is available as a free download from the developer’s homepage.

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You can enable this is the labs settings in your account, and once you do, you should see some suggestions come up. For me this didn’t work perfectly because I actually rarely email groups, let alone more groups. If you use email mostly for client-to-client work you probably won’t find this too useful, but in an office-like work environment this could be really handy.

For myself I’d rather like a better contact management system instead, something better integrated with the compose screen, maybe once that can read your first line and decide on the recipient. You could tell Gmail that if you begin a letter with “Hi Daniel” you want to send an email to me. Based on names this could be automated to some extent too. Do you have any contact feature suggestions for Gmail you’d love to see?

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As some of the more regular readers may know, I’m all into the whole ‘portable’ thing, and am constantly looking for ways to use stealthy software, sync my data or access it wherever I go. So it’s not surprising I stumbled across the SyncKolab Thunderbird extension some time ago looking for a possibility to sync my contacts across different computers as easy as my bookmarks using Foxmarks. Didn’t turn out that time, I just couldn’t get it to work.

But now, you may have guessed it already where this is heading, version 1.0 is out and, what can I say, it works like a charm, and not only for my contacts, but for my lightning-powered to-do’s and calendar items as well!

The whole thing uses the Kolab ‘protocol’ (in lack for a better word), which uses iCals and E-Mails containing xml-files to, among other things, store the items in your IMAP-Folder.

There’s a pretty good tutorial how to set it up as well, but it’s principle is rather simple. Choose an IMAP-Account, the items you want to have synced (contacts, calendar and to-do; the latter two require lightning to be installed) and where to store the data in the IMAP folder structure. I used a new folder named Synckolab containing subfolders for each of the groups, though I don’t know if it’s necessary to split them up.

Conflicts are resolved by using a pre-defined setting (always use server-side or client-side), or by asking the user, which is always my personal weapon of choice.

The whole thing also works with a specialized server component as well as different clients such as KDE’s Kontact for instance. Check out the wikipedia-entry if you’re interested.

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