Contact Management for Outlook

Team Contacts is an Outlook and Exchange-based contact management solution designed for small and mid-sized firms who need to share business contacts between team members. Using Team Contacts, business contacts created by one Outlook user in the firm will automatically be made available to all other connected users. Changes to contact records will also be automatically published for use throughout the firm. User mailboxes need only contain those records related to their business or practice while an up-to-date firm-wide master list can be accessed for targeted mailings and reference.

Business Case for Outlook Contact Management

In many organizations, individuals will often deal with many of the same clients or contacts outside the firm, and each of these people will often have the same information in their personal address list. Inevitably, this scenario leads to out-of-date information as some address card owners receive updates and other do not. Infoware's Team Contacts solution provides an easy way to co-ordinate contact information across the firm, so firms can eliminate disparate duplication, and ensure everyone has access to the most up to date synchronized information.

Benefits of Team Contacts Include:

Firm-Wide Address Synchronization
No Repetitive data entry of Address Information
Changes to Contact Information are automatically replicated
Users can maintain their own collection of address cards
Individuals' folders include Business and Personal Contacts
Integration with Outlook & Exchange
Shared & Private Contact Notes
Address Lookup on Centralized Collections to minimize duplicates
Support for PDAs

How it Works

The solution works by assigning a unique ID number for all contacts created at the firm. This ID number links all copies of the address card throughout the firm and is used to compare changes between different copies. Whenever a change is made to an address record, the software will be set to make the corresponding change to all copies of the item that have the same unique ID. Employees can even share a common set of notes about each entry in the address collection, ensuring everyone has access to the latest information. The solution also allows private notes to be kept by each person.

Only a few changes to the standard Outlook interface are required to make Team Contacts work. As part of the installation and configuration procedure, a modified form is added to Outlook. The new form provides an Address Lookup button which users can click to lookup name and addresses in the firm-wide list. For tracking the ID number, a SQL table or provided Access database can be used. On the Exchange Server a public folder must be created.

Integration with other Infoware tools

Team Contacts integrates with Infoware's Find Contacts Word Add-in to provide an interface to lookup information in Address Collections. Find Contacts can search not only a user's own address list but also another person's contacts folder and a workgroup public folder of contacts. Searching can be done by Contact name, Company or Category. You can even update address information in Outlook from within Word.

Infoware's Holiday Card Application was built for firms who want to personalize their Holiday or Business mailings. Managing a Mass Mailing that includes thousands of addresses is an extremely complicated procedure - Infoware's Holiday Card Application makes this process very simple by sorting addresses based on category entries and will create mailing labels and mailing reports.

About Infoware

Infoware Canada Inc. is a Toronto-based IT consultancy and software development firm. The firm has 20 years experience developing process automation solutions for law firms using the Microsoft products. The firm's Legal Extensions template and macro suites are used by thousands of legal practitioners.

For more information about Infoware's collection of Legal Productivity Solutions visit the Solutions for the Law Office page on our website.

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