Tuesday, November 14, 2006

3190.aspx

Removing duplicate contacts in Microsoft Outlook

I recently started synchronizing all my devices (Pocket PC and mobile phones) with Microsoft Outlook. The good news is that I finally have all my contacts everywhere. The bad news is that I got tons of duplicate contacts as some contacts had the phone number while others had the e-mail. I was about to write my own "merge tool" when I found the free Contacts Scrubber™ for Outlook via Slipstick



The free version can merge up to 1.000 contacts. The registered version has several neat features:



  • Ability to process an unlimited number of items

  • Ability to create user-defined duplicate definitions

  • Auto-processing: scrub duplicates without user intervention

  • Ability to scrub across two Contacts folders

  • Special bonus: adds an Outlook menu option that lets you scrub open Contact items right from within Outlook!

2 comments:

  1. Ciao Egil,

    Hai mai visto come funziona LinkedIn outlook toolbar? E' favoloso perchè ti propone tra le altre cose gli aggiornamenti tra i tuoi contatti e le variazione analoghe su Linkedin. Se per esempio una persona cambia Azienda oppure titolo oppure email ti propone il cambiamento sui tuoi contatti (che così rimangono aggiornati).



    La cosa che ti vorrei stimolare invece è questa...riusciresti ad estrarre daglia archivi delle email il network delle relazioni tra le persone che mi scrivono? Intendo qualcosa di simile a PageRank (l'algoritmo di Larry Page di Google) nel caso dei link alle pagine nel web. Stò cercando di studiare in maniera sistematica i network di opion leader e business expert e questo sarebbe il primo passo (poi bisognerà scrivere dei pesi per le relazioni e studiare i contenuti).



    A presto

    Roberto

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting idea; discovering who counts, and who to contact, for a particular subject by analyzing your e-mail. Indexing and querying is simple enough, the challenge is establishing the "rules" for the "PageRank". Let's discuss the details offline.



    LinkedIn is grand for business contacts but I had a major mess for my private contacts as well. I had some saved as "First name, Surname", some as "First name, S." others as "Surname, First name". After a doing multiple merges on name, phone number and then e-mail address I managed to reduce my contacts DB by more than 30% :-)

    ReplyDelete