My company is really small but each of us has about 2,000 contacts in our Outlook databases. We'd like to consolidate them all, but I'm the one who will be manning the consolidation, and I want to make this as easy as possible. I know there are lots of contact databases on the market, but which one is best? I want to import all 16k clients/vendors from each of our Outlooks, check for duplicates, combine any duplicate entries that have different info (i.e. I have someone's email and my boss has their phone number), and make it easily accessible IN OUTLOOK so my boss can find his contacts without ripping my head off.

Any suggestions? I'm thinking ACT may be my best bet. I'm wondering if any of you IT guys have ever had to consolidate contact lists for your larger companies before, and if so, how you did it. Thanks for any help!

 

I'm not particularly well versed in this area, but since no one else has replied...

I think the problem you're going to run into is that most any solution desigened to deal with this many contacts among multiple people is going to be a server-based system. It sounds like you're office is just stand alone PC's.

The one piece of advice I can give is don't forget to consider the e-mail functionality. The last thing you want to do is find something that will manage your contacts how you want only to realize that you still have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to send out targeted e-mails to large groups.

 

Actually, we do have a server... we're pretty tech-savvy around here, but until now there's never been a need for a large-scale contact DB.

And you're right, email functionality is absolutely key; I need something that will work seamlessly with our email system. I know it can be done, I just don't know how.

 

these guys still the industry leaders? they used to be a few years back, been out of the game...

http://www.act.com/

 

Microsoft CRM

3.0 is looking to be a great product...we're in the process of implementing it now. Works within Outlook for the most part. ACT and Goldmine are dinosaurs.

 

Can CRM import contacts from Goldmine?

 

That is a good question. Here is a suggestion.

I believe there is a way to place Outlook contacts into Excel. If so you can import all 16K contacts that way. After that, in Excel, you can sort by columns/row and get rid of the dupes in the columns/rows. There is a shortcut way to do this in Excel.

The only problem would be to export all the contacts back into Outlook using comma seperated values.

I'm too lazy to see if this works. You may want to test it out with like 10 contacts and a little Google.

Good Luck. I hope you find an easier way.

 

 

Wow, that product looks like it's pretty much exactly what we need... but it seems pretty BIG, like it's designed for larger companies than ours. Do you think its capabilities would go largely unused in a company the size of ours?

I'm going to do more research on it now, but I'm asking cuz I trust your judgment more than my own research in these matters.

 

Can't they create a shared contact list in Outlook?

 

Do your company has a exchange server? You can put up a global address list and everyone in the company can see it and it will replicated to the computer when you work offline.

 

Yeah, contacts are easy. Its the data fields that get tricky. The standard fields are ok, but each custom field needs to be set up individually and mapped to something in CRM.

For example we have a 'subscription expiration date' field in Goldmine. A new field for this value needs to be set up in CRM, then mapped in the db. Multiply this by a few hundred, and its a big task.

Plus goldmine is dbase and CRM is sql. We've been working on this for months.

 

You can get it customized for your needs to some degree. They have a ton of info about it on their website, I'm a little rusty on exactly how much you can pick and choose between features.

Like other people said though, if you have exchange you might be able to do what you need simply through Outlook.

 

We all have shared contact lists in Outlook, but the issue is that all of our contact lists are different, so for instance, if I want to find Gentleman X's phone number, I have to go through each person's contact list before I find it, unless I already know who has him, which with 16k contacts, is rare.

We want to combine them all without it turning into a huge retarded process; I've tried importing them all into the same list, but it doesn't really work because there are some duplicates that aren't exactly the same, so they aren't caught by the duplicate catcher... my options are to spend 3 weekends straight doing data entry to get this done right, or else to buy a software solution that will fix the problem in 3 hours.

 

You are probably better off doing what knight rider mentioned and exporting to excel, synchronizing what you can, and importing back to one master contact list.

Nothing takes 3 hours when it comes to this stuff. Its all a royal pain in the ass.

I actually got stuck as the CRM guy at my office because I was out sick the day the other guy quit. Since I wasn't here, I couldn't argue about it, so they assigned this to me.

 

Business delegation at its finest...

 

You know who's specializes in this is Whiskers. Im sure he has the perfect answer.