Infoware - Outlook Firm-wide Contact Synchronization

Team Contacts

Pricing

Team Contacts provides a firm-wide contact list inside Outlook, that can be shared by all employees. Instead of everyone having their own contact list, each with independent copies of client's names and addresses, everyone can share the Team Contacts list. Changes made to an entry by one employee, can be made immediately available to all staff. Employees can even share a common set of notes about each entry in the contact list, ensuring everyone has access to the latest information. It also allows private notes to be kept by each person. A major benefit of Team Contacts is that each user can still use there own small group of contacts in their own folder, they don't have to work from a large public folder. Team Contacts is a component of Infoware's InControl Practice Management Software. Team Contacts enables Outlook to maintain a central Firm Contacts list, making information about a collection of contacts available to everyone. This allows a change of address for eg. John Smith by one secretary or lawyer to be distributed automatically to all people using John Smith as a contact.

What it does ...

Many people in an organization often deal with the same clients or contacts outside the firm, and each of those people often have the same information in their personal contact list. Team Contacts provides an easy way to co-ordinate that contact information across the firm, so you can eliminate duplication, and ensure everyone has access to the most up to date synchronized information.

Integration with Outlook
Team Contacts works inside Outlook in conjunction with Exchange Server, so you can still work with your e-mail and contact list using the same interface you are already familiar with. Your existing contact list can be easily imported into Team Contacts so you won't lose any data, or have to retype anything.

Firm-wide sharing of data
Once Team Contacts is installed and configured, staff will have access to a common contact list. When someone updates the phone number for a client, everyone instantly benefits from the new information. Other contact lists can be created for smaller groups of people within the firm, so they can share contact information among themselves, without it cluttering up the firm-wide contact list.

Maintain shared notes and private notes on each contact
Every entry in the contact list can contain shared notes which everyone can view and update. This way, staff can share information about clients such as the names of their children, or where they like to have meetings. You can also have personal notes on a contact that only you have access to, so sensitive information doesn't go farther than it should.

Have private contacts as well
When you create a new contact, you can mark it as private so it is never shared with the firm-wide list. This way staff can keep useful information such as their spouse's phone number, in their own contact list, without it affecting the firm-wide list.

Team Contact form

How it works

Outlook Public Folder
Team Contacts works by synchronizing everyone's personal contact list with a public contact list that contains all the firm-wide entries. Someone can even make changes to their own contact list while they are at a conference, disconnected from the company network. When they return, Team Contacts will reconcile their changes with the firm-wide contact list.

Contact IDs
All this is possible through the use of ID numbers. Each contact gets a unique ID when it is created. Suppose the ID number for John Smith is 4136. If two employees each have an entry in their contact list for the same John Smith, then Team Contacts will transparently give each of them a copy of the master contact 4136. That contact resides in the Outlook public folder, and is simply copied to each person's own contact list. Any changes one person makes to 4136 are automatically propagated back to the public folder, and then to everyone else's contact list.

Customized forms in Outlook
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 contact form is added to Outlook. The new contact form provides a Contact Lookup button which employees can click to lookup contacts in the firm-wide list. They can also use the form to post shared notes about contacts, and to mark contacts as private so they are not shared with others.

Pricing and Compatibility:
Team Contacts is available for all versions of Outlook from Outlook 98 to Outlook 2003.
Pricing is $45 US per user, with a minimum order of $500.

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