Onderhoud je e-contacten slim

Contactpersonen-lijst out-of-date? Ontbrekende gegevens? Plaxo.com biedt een online service waarmee je je Outlook-contacten online kunt laten updaten en van extra gegevens voorzien door de contacten zelf.

Integration and simplification make newcomer Plaxo Contacts, developed by Napster cofounder Sean Parker, a pleasure to use. This free contact manager is available via download and nestles into Microsoft Outlook automatically, adding a toolbar and a handy pop-up dashboard for managing and updating your contact lists.

Installation is a three-step process. First, Plaxo lists your Outlook contacts, ranking them by the frequency of your e-mail activity and preselecting those you’ve e-mailed more than five times in the past year. As with GoodContacts, you can then customize your outgoing message and set up your own business and personal contact information. Here Plaxo stumbles a bit, lacking the versatility and depth of GoodContacts. You can edit only the body of your contact-update message, not the subject and salutation, for example, and your contact card can list just one e-mail address versus the three that GoodContacts allows. Finally, you choose whether to send your business information, personal information, or both to your contacts. Plaxo requires you to confirm your e-mail address before it sends update requests?a good idea; unfortunately the setup process doesn’t make this clear, so it is easy to miss.

Recipients get an e-mail with your contact information and theirs. They add any missing information, correct errors, and send the form back. The process is simple and effective.

Plaxo really shines in its integration with Outlook and in its clean interface. The Plaxo toolbar provides a number of ways to access your contact management tools based on what you want to do?edit and send your outgoing contact information or create new contacts, for example.

The program also updates the individual Outlook contact records, reporting whether and when a contact responded to your latest update request and highlighting the new information. You can activate Plaxo from an individual contact card, sending an update of your card or requesting the same from a particular person.

You can also access all your contact information, update specific entries, add new contacts, and send out update requests via Plaxo’s Web site. Your Outlook contacts file and the Plaxo server sync via SSL and https automatically whenever you are online.

(Bron: PCmag.com)