How to find the best Contact Management application for Small and Medium business

How to find the best Contact Management application for small and medium business, vital features to watch out for, points to note when purchasing a Contact Manager. The article also looks into price break-down of Contact Managers
10 Vital Features of a good Contact Manager

So, your contact list is growing larger every day, and so are the number of email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and anniversaries to remember, important notes to keep tidy, to-do-list, instant messages to handle, bulk email messages to process and send. That means you urgently need to find the best tool for managing your contacts before things get out of hand. You need a perfect solution for effectively managing your personal or business contacts. Your best bet is a Contact Manager. There is enormous list of software out there on the internet and all of them claim they are the best for you. But the naked truth is that finding a good Contact Manager is not as easy as it may seem at first glance. You may lose days browsing the net, downloading, installing and trying all of the Contact Managers in the hope of finding the best match for your needs, yet without success.

To help you make a guided decision, I have compiled here the main functions and features you must watch out for before deciding to purchase your Contact Manager.

1. Security
As a rule, all Contact Management software use database to store contact data, therefore when considering a Contact Manager, your first and foremost concern should be security. Database security includes, but not limited to: database access control with password protection, database backup and recovery in the event of database corruption. You certainly do not want every Dick and Harry gaining access to your contacts information, nor do you welcome prying eyes to your private correspondence. Database security becomes a critical issue especially when you are sharing a system/computer with other users.

2. Categorizable contact data entry
Well, this may sound trivial when you have few contacts data to manager. Now consider a situation, where you have hundreds (or thousands) of contact information to store in your database. Unless you are a kindergarten, your contacts will most probably include individuals from different walks of life, including families, friends, relatives, neighbors etc. And if you are doing business, then you will have customers, suppliers, competitors etc. You must have a way of separating personal contacts from business entities in the same database. So, your Contact Manager must come with some set of basic, pre-defined categories, normally called groups, in form of folders or links, under which you can enter each contact data for quick and efficient reference and retrieval in future. An advanced Contact Manager should also enable you to add new groups and sub-groups on the fly without limits, edit or delete the groups as may be required by circumstances.

3. Contact data import from external sources
A good Contact Manager must be equipped with data import function that supports direct or indirect import of contacts data from other popular programs. For example, from Microsoft Outlook Address Book, Microsoft Outlook Express Address Book, Windows Address Book (WAB), and also from any database and spreadsheet program including Microsoft Excel, Access, Open Office tables, so you do not need to repeat the tedious job of manually filling years of contact info into the database from scratch. This will save you time and nerves. With only a click of the button, full contacts data - name, telephones, fax, e-mails, website, city, state, country, company name, department, job title and even birthday for each of your contacts - should be copied from external sources and imported into the database with minimum interference from your end.

4. Contact data export to external sources
Although contact data export to external sources may not be a serious issue to many users, but I will rather opt for a Contact Manager with facilities to export records from database directly to other office programs for further manipulation or save the records into files of various formats such as: Word, Excel, Plain Text, Rich Text, HTML, Comma-separated Text, Tab-separated Text, Data Interchange Format, SYLK Format. You never know when and where you will need it!

5. Miscellaneous information organizer
Your Contact Manager should assist you in managing not only pure contact data, but also keeping miscellaneous information tidy and separate in easy-to-manage folders. Again, miscellaneous information should be kept under categories or groups such as hobbies, sports, holidays, leisure, shopping, recipes, to-do-list, books and their authors, films, software licenses, political events etc. No sticky notes.

6. Auto-Reminder for important events and dates
Audio and/or pop-up alert system should keep in memory and trigger reminders for important events and dates, early enough for you to take necessary action: be it your contact birthday, family day, national or religious holidays, company anniversaries, high-priority tasks, important notes, etc. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is missed. And some advanced Contacts Manager such as A-Z Contacts Manager are even equipped with facilities to send e-mail greetings with cards to all contacts having birthdays or anniversaries on a particular date or date interval. There is a system calendar included in the program, which you can use to select the date interval for contact birthdays. After you have specified the date interval (say, 2 weeks), A-Z Contacts Manager will select from your database contacts whose birthdays fall within the dates and then send to them greeting message with or without card as attachment. Apart from this, A-Z Contacts Manager has the ability to send single and mass, customized emails to your contacts. Salutation, recipient name(s) are automatically inserted into message sent to each of the contacts. Sent messages with delivery status are saved in the correspondence archive as templates and can be used again in future.

7. Multi-User capability and data sharing
For simplicity and within the scope of this write-up, let's define multi-user capability as ability for more than 1 user to connect to, share/use a common database. Well, presently you are not doing business nor do you have many users to connect to your database. But who knows? The situation may be different tomorrow. So if there is an option, without heavy impact on the final price, then always go for Contact Manager with embedded Multi-user capability. More especially if most of your contacts today are business entities. As your business grows, you can add more and more users to share a single database, saving yourself additional cost and time of database duplications.

Also note that data sharing can be accomplished either by direct connection to the database file or via a server. If you plan to have more than 3 users concurrently accessing the database, then you should seriously consider connection via a server. This is because the basic mechanism behind direct database connection is file-locking. Meaning, if a user is connected to the database and busy processing data, other users may have to wait until he finishes. What if he leaves his desktop unattended for hours?

On the contrary, connection via a server does not suffer this setback. The server has application(s) and data storage system that are shared in common by multiple computer users via a network. In addition, connection through a server is faster, with more room for data storage and security, but may require some additional technical knowledge. A local area network may serve as few as two or three users (for example, in a home network) or as many as thousands of users (for example, in an FDDI network). Many networks run on a two-tier approach, in which the client computers are connected to a central server, but each client has their own copy of a particular application (in this case, Contact Manager) installed on them. This means all processing happens on the client computers, and the connection to the server is used only for data retrieval.

8. Minimum configuration and system requirements
You do not need to buy expensive hardware nor third-party software to use your Contact Manager. A good Contact Manager must be fine-tuned for the average user, optimized and perform relatively well on low-budget computers. No additional drivers to install or upgrade. If and where required, the installation module should do everything necessary on the fly. And you must be able to uninstall the software from your computer at any time without hassles. Detailed help documentation with examples is also a must to consider a Contact Manager worthy of your attention.

9. Customizable options
Because we all have our individual preferences, your Contact Manager should not take it for granted that you enjoy black coffee without sugar. You must be able to customize most of the features, perfectly adapt the software look and behavior to your taste, modifying its alarm sounds, the look, text size and fonts, colors of most elements, pop-up reminder windows or the working of the email manager, making things friendly to you.

10. Price
If you want a complete contact management program with breath-taking advanced features, then you must be prepared to pay some price. Contact Manager should not cost you a fortune, either. There is no de facto pricing model for Contact Managers, although there are many outrageously over-priced contact management applications out there. Free or too cheap Contact Managers are not looked into here, either. So you should not consider the extremes. Price will depend largely on the features and functions included in the application, after-sales service such as updates, upgrade and available customer support. A complete desktop contact management solution should cost between $40 and $80 per user/computer.

If you want a complete solution with total customization of your contact management program, breath-taking advanced features, then you are encouraged to try low-cost desktop applications such as A-Z Contacts Manager (http://www.josytal.com/azcntmng). And best of all, the program is free for personal use.
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About the author: Dr. Joseph Ogunbiyi is a software developer, author and publisher of award-winning software for home, small and medium business. He co-owns and manages Josytal, a software engineering and marketing company - http://www.josytal.com