An Obsessive Precisionist needs your Opinions and Options related to Contact Lists…
I am quite particular about the health, simplicity, usefulness, and organization of my contact list (address book) in my computer (please tell me you don’t still use a rolodex!). Anyone as obsessive as I am?
I want my contacts…
- …in one place. I don’t want to have to update my contacts in several places. When there is a change, I only want to change it in one place.
- …automatically synced to several machines (Home computer, work computer, iPhone, etc).
- …to be synced with my donor software (TNTMPD)
- …to be filtered or tagged into different groups (Family, Supporters, RMI, General, etc)
- …to have unlimited Home, Work, Phone, Email fields for each listing.
- …shared.
I have found that most of my desires are taken care of with Google Contacts. There are still some limitations that need to be updated in Google Contacts, but it is a far step above other options.
So, here are my questions for you all…
- Do you know of a good solution for sharing contacts among several people? I want to share contacts like I share calendars within Google, but true shared contacts is not available in Google. I pray it is coming, but not yet.
- I have always had “households”, or husband and wife, together, in one contact entry. But, now I am considering splitting them up. This splitting would be most helpful in email and cell phone applications. It seems a no brainer to split them up, but if I do, then my mailing/donor list is messed up. I have reasons to keep them together, and reasons to split them up. Oh, what do I do? Your opinions?
Rob
Comments
I just got my first iPhone and I'm thinking along a lot of the same lines as you. Your best bet at this point is probably to acquire a copy of Outlook and use TntMPD's built-in synchronization with that. Then you could use iTunes to sync your iPhone with Outlook. Or you could search for a program to sync Outlook with Google Contacts (I haven't tried it, but I know such programs are claimed to exist).
I'm getting fairly interested in trying to program something that would run on a server and do a 2-way sync between Google Contacts and a TntMPD database (ideally stored in Dropbox). That would remove the need for Outlook and be one step on the way to a web-based TntMPD replacement.
Couples: one contact or two. Good question! TntMPD obviously wants one. Just about everything else wants two. I haven't figured that one out yet. My program idea may split TntMPD couples out to two contacts in Google Contacts (for phone use, etc)
Tell me more about your thinking regarding sharing contacts. I've heard all kinds of ideas for various purposes, but nothing has really made the light bulb turn on over my head yet.
Keep the questions coming, this is good stuff that would be useful for a lot of missionaries!
-Jason